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A SHELF OF OLD BOOKS 



A SHELF OF OLD BOOKS 
BY MRS. JAMES T, FIELDS 



NOV 16 1894 



CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

NEW YORK. MDCCCXCIV 



f4- 



Copyright, 1894, bv 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 



/Z'dl/(, 



'ress of J. J. Little & Co. 
Astor Place, New York 



CONTENTS 
Leigh Hunt, .... 


PAGE 
/ 


Edinlmrgb, .... 


. 69 


From Milton to Thackeray, 


. 141 



/"o?/ 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



PAGE 



"My Friend's Library," = . Frontispiece. 

^ Leigh Hunt, 2 

By Samuel Laurence. 

Leigh Hunt, 5 

From a drawing made in 181^. 

^Autograph of Leigh Hunt, . . . . 8 

'"'Birthplace of Shelley, / / 

^eats, '7 

From life cast. 

Barry Cornwall, -2' 

" Inscription in Marianne Hunt's Boccaccio, 25 

Joseph Severn, ^7 

"Ariel on the Bat's Back," . . . 29 
By J. Severn. 



List of Illustrations 



Keats, 



From a drawing by Severn. 

Inscription on Fly-leaf of Diogenes Laertins, 
owned by Shelley and Leigh Hnnt, 

From Diogenes Laertins, . . . . 



Percy Bysshe Shelley, 



PAGE 
SI 



34 
35 
37 



Letter of Shelley, ^/ 



Keats' s Poem, "I stood tip-toe itpon a 



little hill,' 



/ 



From Leigh Hunt's Coleridge, 



^. 



y 



Leigh Hunt's Annotation, . 

Note in Chaucer, 

Grave of Shelley, .... 

Sir Walter Scott, 

By Stuart Newton. 

A Note to his Publisher by Lord Byron, 



Rev. John Brown, . 



43 
45 
56 
5S 
61 

70 

75 
77 



List of Illustrations xf 



PAGE 

Dr. John Brown of Edinburgh, . . \ 79 



Marjorie Fleming, 8^ 

By her Cousin Isabella Keith. 

John Wilson (" Christopher North"), . . 97 
William and Robert Chambers, . . .102 

John Wilson's Home at Elleray, . . . lOy 

De Ouincev, J 10 

De Ouincev to Mr. Fields, . . . ■ H3 

Robert Burns, 119 

Portrait of Ramsay, 121 

Mrs. Lockhart, Scott's Daughter, . . . 124 

Autograph Poem by At Ian Ramsay, . .12^ 

Sir Walter Scott 129 

Bv Sir Thomas Lawrence. 

^Note of Sir Walter Scott, . . . .133 



List of Illustrations 



Miniature of Walter Scott, made in his fifth 
or sixth year, .... 

Walter Scott, Father of Sir Walter, 

Anne Rutherford, Sir Walter Scott' s Mother, 

Lady Scott, 

Bust of Milton, about 1 6 y4, 

Norton, Milton's Early Home, 

Title-page of Milton's Poems, with Gray 
Autograph, 



Milton, 

Letter of Dr. fohnson, 



Dr. Samuel Johnson, 

By Sir Joshua Reynolds. 

^ Ludlow Castle, .... 

" The Lady's Last Stake," . 
By Hogarth. . 



134 
136 

137 
138 
142 
'45 

147 

159 
16^ 

i6g 
'77 



Gar rick's yUla, lyg 



List of Illustrations xiii 



PAGE 



Letter of Charles Lamb, . . . . iS^ 

Portion of a Letter from Mrs. Procter, . igi 

Henry Lawes, 20^ 

Thackeray -when about Thirty Years Old, . 20J 

Sketch, 2og 

By W. M. Thackeray. 

Tell Tale, . . . • . . .211 
By Cniikshank. 

Note of IV. M. Thackeray, . . . .214 



LEIGH HUNT 




Portrait of Leigh Hunt, by Samuel Laurence. 



LEIGH HUNT 

There is a sacredness about the belongings 
of good and great men which is quite apart 
from the value and significance of the things 
themselves. Their books become especially 
endeared to us ; as we turn the pages they 
have loved, we can see another hand pointing 
along the lines, another head bending over the 
open volume, A writer's books make his work- 
shop and his pleasure-house in one, and in 
turning over his possessions we discover the 
field in which he worked and the key to his 
garden of the Hesperides. 

The influence of Leigh Hunt's surroundings 
upon John Keats illustrates this idea perfectly. 
Keats was hardly known, even to himself, when 
Leigh Hunt, with his infallible touchstone for 
discerning literary excellence in others, recog- 
nized his sensitive nature and drew him into 



A Shelf of Old Books 



friendly relations. Charles Cowden Clarke tells 
us that he went to call on Leigh Hunt one day, 
at a pretty cottage in the Vale of Health, on 
Hampstead Heath, soon after he and Keats 
had left school and gone to London. He car- 
ried in his pocket two or three of Keats's son- 
nets, which he thought were so good for a youth 
under age that he would venture to show them 
to Leigh Hunt, but he was not prepared for 
the prompt admiration with which they were 
received. The visit ended in a promise that 
he would soon bring Keats to Hampstead. It 
was in the library of this cottage, where one 
night a temporary bed had been made up for 
him on the sofa, that Keats composed the poem 
on " Sleep and Poetry," inspired by his sur- 
roundings. It was a modest room, clothed with 
such treasures as even a poor man may possess, 
but none the less there was inspiration in theni 
for a poet's brain. 

" It was a poet's home who keeps the keys 
Of pleasure's temple — round about were hung- 
The glorious features of the bards who sung 
In other ages — cold and sacred busts 
Smiled at each other." 





Portrait of Leigh Hunt. (From a drawing made in 1815.) 



Leigh Hunt 7 

Keats's poem is indeed an exquisite illustra- 
tion of the way in which our brains and hearts 
may be touched to finer issues by such sur- 
roundings. 

As I quote these lines, fearful of some slip 
of a treacherous memory, I take a small vol- 
ume of Keats from the shelf of old books. 
It is a battered little copy in green cloth, with 
the comfortable aspect of having been abroad 
with some loving companion in a summer 
shower. It is the copy long used by Tenny- 
son, and evidently worn in his pocket on many 
an excursion. He once handed it to Mr. Fields 
at parting, and it was always cherished by the 
latter with reverence and affection. Here, in 
its quiet corner, the little book now awaits the 
day when some new singer shall be moved to 
song in memory of the great poet who loved 
and treasured it. 

Many years ago it was our privilege to see 
Leigh Hunt in London, and to make a travel- 
ler's slight acquaintance with the interior which 
had inspired Keats. In response to a note of 
invitation, a portion of which is reproduced 
here, we drove to Hammersmith, where he 



'y-C ifi/7 



fey Cif hi^ifi^fj^ ^^ . ^ 



Irr /C ^//4 /a^ *^^/ 



*^^^*^. 






Part of a Note of Invitation from Leigh Hunt. 



Leigh Hunt g 

was then hving. He was an old man with 
snowy hair, contrasting in this respect with the 
portrait in these pages, which was taken in the 
year 1815, at the request of Vincent Novello, 
just as he was leaving prison. But his eyes 
were still brilhant, and the fascinating grace of 
his manner was unimpaired. He was naturally 
rather tall and of a slender figure, but incessant 
daily toil at the desk caused him to stoop some- 
what, though his son says of him, " He was 
straight as an arrow and looked slenderer 
than he really Avas ; " but this was in earlier 
years, before time and toil had left their im- 
press. 

At the period of our visit, Leigh Hunt had 
reached his seventy-fifth year, and had long ago 
moved away from the pretty cottage at Hamp- 
stead. He was then living in a small house 
— one in a block of wooden buildings, if my 
memory serves me — which presented few ex- 
ternal attractions either to a worldly or aesthetic 
observer; but Leigh Hunt was there, with his 
elegance and charm, like a prince in hiding. 
The same treasures were around him, too, 
which lighted Keats's fire of song. The Greek 



lo A Shelf of Old Books 

casts, " Sappho's meek head," " Great Alfred's 
too," " and Kosciusko's ; " 

" Petrarch, outstepping- from the shady green, 
Starts at the sight of Laura ; nor can wean 
His eyes from her sweet face." 

There they were, treasures indeed, when we 
remember that Keats opened his dreamy eyes 
upon them and found in them the motive of 
his verse ; in themselves they were but a few 
casts, a few engravings, a few sketches in color, 
a number of w^ell-worn books, with windows 
full of flowers, and no heavy draperies to keep 
away heaven's light. The fresh white muslin 
curtains swayed in the summer breeze as Leigh 
Hunt talked, and the enchantment of his dis- 
course captivated us as surely as it had done 
for so many years all those who had come into 
personal relation with him. We forgot the tea- 
table and forgot the hours, while he introduced 
us to his daughters, to his flowers (he called 
them "his gentle household pets"), and to his 
latest literary interests and occupations. He 
wore the dignity and sweetness of a man not 
only independent of worldly ambitions, but of 



12 A Shelf of Old Books 

one dependent upon unworldly satisfactions. 
There was no sense of defeat because he was a 
poor man, nor of inadequacy, except for lack 
of time and strength to frequently " entertain 
strangers." He wore the air of a noble laborer 
— ceaseless, indefatigable ; and when we re- 
member that the wolf was driven from his 
door through so long a life by his busy pen, a 
pen unarmed with popular force, he might well 
feel that the struggle had been an honorable 
one. In referring to his flowers, which were 
just breaking into clusters of bloom, he fell 
into a revery in talk upon the mystery and 
ministry of beauty in the world, a subject 
which he has made peculiarly his own ; but he 
soon strayed into the beloved paths of litera- 
ture, and then indeed everything else was for- 
gotten. His daughters tried in every way to 
decoy him to the table, but in vain, until at 
length they ran off with half his audience, 
when he soon followed. 

Wherever Hunt lived, flowers seemed to 
have been his inseparable companions. In his 
younger days when in prison, he papered his 
walls with a trellis of roses, and caused plants 



Leigh Hunt 13 

to be put before the barred windows. They 
were as characteristic companions as his books. 
He managed to have a wonder of a garden 
also within the prison Hmits, and he says of it : 
" There was a httle )-ard outside the room, 
railed olT from another belonging to the neigh- 
boring ward. This yard I shut in with green 
palings, adorned it with a trellis, bordered it 
with a thick bed of earth from a nursery, and 
even contrived to have a grass-plot. The earth 
I filled with flowers and young trees. There was 
an apple-tree, from which we managed to get a 
pudding the second year. As to my flowers, 
they were allowed to be perfect. Thomas 
Moore, who came to see me with Lord Byron, 
told me he had seen no such heart's-ease. I 
bought the Parnaso Italiano while in prison, and 
used often to think of a passage in it, while 
looking at this miniature piece of horticul- 
ture : 

' Mio picciol orto, 
A me sei vigna, e campo, e selva, e prato Baldi.' " 

It seemed the most natural thing possible to 
hear Leigh Hunt talk of Shelley and Keats as 



14 A Shelf of Old Books 



if they had just closed the door by which we 
had entered. There was the very couch, per- 
haps, where Keats lay down to sleep, after, as 
he says, straying "in Spenser's halls;" for they 
had no room for him, we remember, and he 
was made to rest there among the books ; and 
there, when he awoke, were 

" Might half slumb'ring- on his own right arm," 

and those other m\'sterious shadows of his 
poem. 

Hunt said, in talking of Shelley, " It was not 
in him to hate a human being ; but I remember 
being startled once by his saying, ' Hunt, why 
is it that we all w^'ite love-songs ? why shouldn't 
we write hate-songs ? ' And he said he would 
some day, poor fellow I I believe, however, 
that he really did dislike the second Mrs. God- 
win, because she was incapable of telling the 
truth, and he used to say, when he was obliged 
to dine with her, ' that he would lean back in 
his chair and languish into hate.'" It was 
interesting, too, in view of the unsatisfactory 
portraits and busts of Shelley, to hear Leigh 
Hunt say that "no one could describe him," 



Leigh Hunt 15 

and that he always seemed " as if he were just 
alit from the planet Mercury, bearing a winged 
wand tipped with flame." 

Although our visit to Leigh Hunt was within 
a few months of his death, the native elasticity 
of his mind and the living grace of his manner 
were undimmed. He wore no aspect of the 
coming change, and the wan appearance of the 
portrait afifixed to his Autobiography was so 
foreign to our memory of him that Mr. Fields 
has inscribed above it, " I saw Leigh Hunt in 
1859, ^^^ ^^"^is portrait bears no resemblance to 
the poet as I saw him. J. T. F." There is no 
Leigh Hunt now to enchant, and no Keats to 
be enchanted among the old books ; but as we 
stand silentl}' in the corner where the volumes 
rest together, watching the interchanging lights 
thrown through green branches from the shin- 
ing river .be\'ond, we remember that these 
causes of inspiration still abide with us, and 
that other book-lovers are yet to pore over 
these shelves and gather fresh life from the 
venerable volumes which stand upon them. 

John Sterling said, many years ago, " They 
only find who know where to look." It was 



i6 A Shelf of Old Books 

a skilful eye as well as a loving hand that 
brought this collection of books together. It is 
not one of the well-equipped libraries of a rich 
man, and we are sometimes led to think, in 
these later days of accessible public libraries, 
that it is a mistake to multiply books, with 
their attendant care, in priv^ate houses ; but 
" My Friend's Library " is a collection of vol- 
umes which the collector himself read and 
loved, interspersed with such treasures as I 
have hinted at — -books which have belonged to 
other writers, and been loved by readers whose 
very names are sacred. 

The shelves near which we have been pausing 
are dedicated especially to Leigh Hunt's books. 
He was himself the prince of careful readers, 
enriching the pages as he passed over them 
with marks and comments which will serve to 
indicate passages of subtile meaning or noble 
incentive to all those who follow him while the 
books remain. 

The history of the transfer of these volumes 
to our shores is easily told. " It is amazing," 
Dickens used to say, as if he were perceiving 
something nobody had ever thought of before. 




Miss Whitney's Bust of Keats. 



1 8 A Shelf of Old Books 

" it is amazing what love can do ! " And it was 
love for Leigh Hunt personally which real!}- 
brought these books of his to America. Al- 
though the best of readers, he was a man who 
believed in a generous use of books, and he lent 
and gave them away as if he were almost indif- 
ferent to their preservation. Those which were 
dearest and most useful somehow clung about 
him, yet the number of broken sets of valuable 
books among his collection is almost incredible. 
Such as they were, however, Mr. Fields desired 
to have them, and they were all despatched to 
him soon after Leigh Hunt's death. There 
were about four hundred and fifty volumes al- 
together, and of these Mr. Fields kept less than 
two hundred. " I was foolish not to have kept 
them all," he often said in later years; but at 
the moment many persons appeared who ex- 
pressed great enthusiasm about them, and it 
seemed like a kind of selfishness to keep them 
all. More than half the collection was scat- 
tered, and many have changed hands more 
than once since that time. We do not like 
to think of them wandering about homeless, 
or possibly finding shelter in some second- 



Leigh Hunt 19 



hand book-shop, gazing helplessly from unloved 
shelves. 

The interest which hangs about this little 
group, thus snatched as it were from oblivion, 
is sufificient to detain us in this paper. A 
happy chance brought us to this shelf ; let us 
not wander just now farther afield. 

Leigh Hunt's association with the men of 
letters of his time was close and single-hearted. 
No man ever held more firmly to the path he 
had chosen. He was, as I have said, continually 
at his work. To call a man of his tastes and 
temperament no lover of pleasure, would seem 
strangely inconsistent ; but his pleasures were 
taken in Shakespeare's forest, in Spenser's pal- 
ace, in Cowley's garden, in Herbert's church. 
He need not leave his own fireside for his fin- 
est enjoyments, and it was seldom indeed that 
Lord Holland or anybody else could lure him 
away from his writing-desk to the dinner-table. 
He was no diner-out ; nevertheless, he became 
the intimate of the most interesting men of 
his time. He was the friend and biographer 
of Byron, he was greatly beloved by Shelley, 
and we have alreadv seen how much he con- 



A Shelf of Old Books 



tributed to the happiness of Keats. He loved 
Shelley more deeply than the rest, and saw 
him much more intimately ; but Carlyle, Haz- 
litt, Lamb, and Barry Cornwall, and the No- 
vellos, not to mention other famous writers, 
musicians, and artists of his day, were all 
upon friendly terms with him. Once onl}' did 
we meet him at dinner, at Mrs. Procter's. It 
was a memorable occasion. Adelaide Proc- 
ter, Hawthorne, Charles Sumner, Kinglake, 
and other celebrities were present ; but Leigh 
Hunt's winning aspect and delightful talk made 
the occasion truly sympathetic and agreeable. 
I can recall, as we left the table, Barry Cornwall 
putting his arm about Hunt's shoulder, as they 
went up the stair, with the affectionate look of 
one who saw his dear friend only too rarely. 
Lideed, we were afterward told it was the last 
time he dined out in company. 

His social spirit is shown by the manner of 
his reading. He could never keep the good 
things to himself. He was truly " The Indi- 
cator " and " The Seer " for those who were to 
read after him. Up and down the pages run 
notes and marks to attract the attention of the 



Leigh Hunt 21 

unwary. No fine epithet, no deHcate allusion, 
no fitting word, was lost upon his sensitive 
ear. We cannot help touching the pages with 
veneration which have been read, re-read, and 




.rry Cornwall. 



made precious by signs that serve as intellect- 
ual guides to the mind. 

The books relating to Leigh Hunt in this 
collection may be divided into two groups : 



22 A Shelf of Old Books 



first, those of his own writing ; and, second, 
those from which he often drew his inspiration, 
the books he loved to feed upon, his best com- 
panions. It is interesting to stand in this way, 
as it were, between the student and the author, 
on the ground between the conception and 
the finished work. By following his footsteps 
through the books he loved, we gather new 
light upon these companions of the mind, and 
at the same moment we gain fresh appreciation 
of Hunt's own peculiar talent for making the 
antique seed-grain bloom again. 

In looking over the works of any true poet, 
and such Leigh Hunt undoubtedly was, we 
must in justice seek to know him in his poems ; 
for, however well a poet may write prose, we 
must search his poetry to learn his most sin- 
cere expression and to discover that capacity, 
if he have it, for rising above his subject, which 
is a necessary quality of all good writing. 

In Leigh Hunt's books we can often discover 
the suggestions and inspirations of his poems. 
It might be so, perhaps, with many another 
poet if we could find just such another reader. 
But he may be called an imprisoned singer, not 



Leigh Hunt 23 

alone in those years when he was actually shut 
in prison walls, but by reason of his constant 
confinement to his desk because of the neces- 
sity for continual toil. Many of these hours, 
too, in his ripest manhood, were passed in the 
prosaic labor of a newspaper man's office. He 
found his refreshment and compensation in 
books. " The Story of Rimini," redolent as it 
is of Italy, was written in his London prison, 
long before Italy was anything but a dream to 
him. It is far from wonderful that the poem is 
no better ; the wonder is that it has life at all. 

Hunt's love of Italy was very early awak- 
ened, and we have a delightful glimpse of him 
as a boy, first learning Italian at Christ's Hos- 
pital with his friend Barnes. It was a time of 
intense enjoyment. " We went shouting the 
beginning of Metastasio's ' Ode to Venus,' " he 
says, " as loud as we could bawl, over the 
Hornsey fields, and I can repeat it to this day 
from those first lessons." 

Here is the large old copy of " The Novels 
and Tales of the Renowned John Boccaccio, 
the first Refiner of Italian Prose : containing A 
Hundred Curious Novels, by Seven Honorable 



24 A Shelf of Old Books 



Ladies and Three Noble Gentlemen, Framed 
in Ten Days." It was printed in London in 
1684, and bears upon the first fly-leaf the fol- 
lowing inscription : 

" To Marianne Hunt — 
" Her Boccaccio {alter ct idem) come back 
to her after many years' absence, for her 
good-nature in giving it away in a foreign 
country to a traveller whose want of books was 
still worse than her own. 

" From her affectionate husband, 

Leigh Hunt. 
"August 23, 1839. — Chelsea," 

Boccaccio was one of Leigh Hunt's prime 
favorites, and there is another copy in different 
form close at hand. This time it is in two 
small leather-covered volumes printed " in 
Venezia," in the year 1542. The autograph 
inscription on the title-page is as follows : 

" These volumes are presented as a slight but 
heartfelt acknowledgement for the kindnesses 
received by John Wilson from Leigh Hunt 
Esqre. 

" December 3d 1840." 



4 






^ 



si 

As 






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^ 






\ 



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t 1^^ 



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"^ i 









26 A Shelf of Old Books 

Unhappily Leigh Hunt's copy of Dante is 
not among the old books ; perhaps it never 
came to America. I only find three vol- 
umes of Commentaries on the Poets of Italy, 
which were evidently useful books to him, and 
the Memoirs (in English) of Alessandro Tas- 
soni. Near these stand his own two volumes of 
" Stories from Italian Poets," which are dedi- 
cated to Shelley. They are in the form of a 
summary of the great works by the five prin- 
cipal narrative poets of Italy — Dante, Pulci, 
Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso — and they prove to 
us at least the careful study he had bestowed 
upon Italian literature. Many of the most 
precious of Leigh Hunt's old books are asso- 
ciated with that portion of his life passed in 
Italy ; chiefly, in our minds, perhaps, because 
Shelley and Keats, his dearest friends, died 
there, and because his friendship for Shelley 
ripened upon Italian soil. There are three of 
these books standing in a row, which must be 
looked upon especially with reverence, I be- 
lieve, by all lovers of literature. The first is 
an illustrated copy of Shelley's poems, the one 
edited by Mrs. Shelley and dedicated to their 



Leigh Hunt 



27 



son, after Shelley's death, in 1839. ^t bears 
upon its title-page the following inscription : 







4/^ 



Joseph Severn. 



" To Marianne Hunt on her birthday, Sep. 
28, 1844, from her loving husband Leigh 



28 A Shelf of Old Books 

Hunt." This edition contains two interesting 
portraits of Shelley, and a picture of Field 
Place, in Sussex, where he was born ; also an 
etching of the cottage in which he lived at 
Marlowe, and two different views of his burial 
place. 

There is also laid between the leaves of this 
book, at the opening of the " Adonais," a letter 
from Joseph Severn, of whom Shelley says in 
his preface to the poem (as all the v.'orld forever 
will remember) : " He (Keats) was accompa- 
nied to Rome by Mr. Severn, a young artist 
of the highest promise, who, I have been in- 
formed, ' almost risked his own life, and sacri- 
ficed every prospect to unwearied attendance 
upon his dying friend.' Had I known these 
circumstances before the completion of my 
poem, I should have been tempted to add my 
feeble tribute of applause to the more solid 
recompense which the virtuous man finds in 
the recollection of his own motives. Mr. 
Severn can dispense with a reward from ' such 
stuff as dreams are made of.' His conduct is 
a golden augury of the success of his future 
career — may the unextinguished Spirit of his 



BBIIlipipi^^ li|illi||fmi| iiiiiiii|ii|iiiiiiiii||i i I 




f 



I I 
I'liiil J^ 

E 



30 



A Shelf of Old Books 



illustrious friend animate the creations of 
his pencil, and plead against Oblivion for his 
name ! " In Severn's letter, which is addressed 
to Mr. Fields in 1871, he says, " I confess that I 
live upon the past." He encloses a photograph 
of himself (and this also is inserted), taken from 
a picture made when he was but twenty-seven 
years old, adding, " My lanthorn jaws I do not 
send." It is by no means a disappointing face, 
but one full of gentleness and enthusiasm. 

The mention of Severn's name leads me to 
other unpublished letters from him, containing 
further particulars of those early days when he 
was with Keats. To that period also belongs 
a picture which hangs near the books, of 
" Ariel on the Bat's Back," a fanciful and yet 
realistic bit of painting, giving a good idea 
of Severn's own ability at his ripest period. 
We learn the origin of his paper on Keats, 
written for the Atlantic Monthly of April, 
1863, in a letter to Mr. Fields. He says, "At 
last I have performed my promise to you in 
writing a paper on Keats, which I now enclose. 
. . . You will be interested by the romantic 
incident in my Keats paper, of my charming 



'''"'/.'' //'f/^f/V' /'''^//<;V/=^' '''Y'y, ,v 






</ 




From a drawing of Keats by Severn, in the poss. 



Leigh Hunt ^3 



meeting with the poet's sister in Rome, and 
that we have become Hke brother and sister. 
She lives here with her Spanish family ; her 
name is Llanos ; she was married to a distin- 
guished Spanish patriot and author, and has 
two sons and two daughters, one of whom is 
married to Brockman, the Spanish director of 
the Roman railways. . . . 

" I am glad you saw my posthumous portrait 
of Keats. It was an effort to erase his dead 
figure from my memory and represent my last 
pleasant sight of him." And in another letter, 
referring to the drawing of Keats reproduced 
here, he says : " I am your debtor, for you set 
me about a task so congenial that when my 
daughter saw me draw it she declared it was 
an inspiration and implored me to do her also a 
sketch of Keats. I am glad to assure you that 
it is a good likeness, and gave me delight even 
in this respect, in calling up his dear image." 

The second, of the three interesting books 
already referred to, is an old brown leather- 
covered volume, which is more closely associated 
with Shelley and Leigh Hunt than any of the 
others. Shelley's generosity was unbounded, 
3 



34 A Shelf of Old Books 




and in his eagerness to have Hunt share his 
enjoyments he would often part for a time 
even with his most precious books. The names 



Leigh Hunt 35 



of the two friends stand upon the fly-leaf of 
this copy of Diogenes Laertius. It is written 
in Greek and Latin, with double columns; but 
the notes, which appear to be all written b}' 
Shelley, are in Greek and English. Unfortu- 

1^2 PLATO. Lib.IIL 

lamdudum viuis Inctbas lucifer , at 

nunc 

Exthifius luces Hefperus Elyfiit. 

30) Li Dionem vero ia hunc 
modum: 

£t lacrymat Heciibae , et Troianit fn- 
ta puillis 

Dscreuert recens ex genitrice fntit. 

At tibi pofl partos prneclaro Marts 

From Shelley's Copy of Diogenes Laertius. (The lines prefixed to 
" Adonais.") 

nately they are written in pencil, and are slowly 
but surely disappearing. 

One of the first written is still legible : " To 
read Diogenes again and againT Mrs. Shel- 
ley says of her husband : " His extreme sen- 
sibility gave the intensity of passion to his 
intellectual pursuits ; " and we feel, as his eyes 
ranged over the splendid garden of the ancients 



36 A Shelf of Old Books 



which this book spread out before him, how 
the passion grew, and how the light of his spirit 
vivified the printed lines. He marked page 
after page for reference ; poems rose before his 
fancy as he read, until at length the lines of 
Plato shone upon him which now stand as 
prelude to the " Adonais." They are from an 
epitaph upon a certain Stella, and may be 
rendered into English as follows : 

" Living, you shone as Lucifer in the morning sky ; 
Dead, you now shine as Hesperus among the shades." 

But why translate them into prose, when 
Shelley himself has left them crystallized in the 
heart of an English verse ! 

"Thou wert the morning star among the living, 
Ere thy fair light had fled ; — 
Now, having died, thou art as Hesperus, giving 
New splendor to the dead." * 

* I found the following translation of this verse among the 
Greek fragments of that unrivalled translator and poet, Edward 
H. Fitz-Gerakl: 

" Star of the morning shinedst thou, 

Ere life had fled : 

Star of the evening art thou now 

Among the dead ! " 




Percy Bysshe Shelley. 



Leigh Hunt 39 



It is no stretch of imagination to see Shelley 
with this book under the olive-trees on some 
solitary height, or floating with it as his sole 
companion in his fateful boat. His love for it 
was not a passing fancy ; he seems to have 
lived with it for several years, as we find men- 
tion of it first in the year 1814, in Professor 
Dowden's deeply interesting biography. In 
that most miserable season when Shelley was 
in hiding from the bailiffs, Mary writes to him 
from her solitary lodgings : " Will you be at 
the door of the Coffee House at five o'clock, as 
it is disagreeable to go into such places ? I 
shall be there exactly at that time, and we can 
go into St. Paul's, where we can sit down. I 
send you Diogenes, as you have no books." 
Professor Dowden adds in a note : " Probably a 
translation of Wieland's Diogenes ; " but in a 
list of books read by Mary and Shelley during 
that year, a few pages further on, it is distinctly 
set down as " Diogenes Laertius." 

In the "Adonais" we feel that Shelley's 
genius tried his bravest wing; and for the key- 
note of this great poem he found and marked 
the verses already quoted. Perhaps he saw 



40 A Shelf of Old Books 

from his mount of vision another star, his own, 
and knew that he soon should follow to the 
kingdom of the shades. " It was more than 
fifty years ago that this old book went wander- 
ing about the continent," Mr. Fields writes, 
" with the two young English poets, and was 
thumbed by them on the decks of vessels, in 
the chambers of out-of-the-way inns, and under 
the olive-trees of Pisa and Genoa." 

Now it is at last safely housed, and with its 
plain brown coat, a hermit thrush among books, 
stands unsuspected in its quiet corner. By and 
by will not some other lover in some later age 
hear the voice again ? 

Standing next to Diogenes Laertius on the 
shelf, is the third volume to which we have 
referred, a book where Coleridge, Shelley, 
and Keats stand bound together, three in one, 
with Leigh Hunt's notes sometimes covering 
the margins. This book was a petted posses- 
sion both of Hunt and its last owner. It is 
enriched with autographs , of each of the au- 
thors, and upon the fly-leaf at the back Leigh 
Hunt has copied a poem written to him by 
Keats " On the Story of Rimini." This was 



.^ 



"^ 



1 4 v1 








^ 











42 



A Shelf of Old Books 



sent originally to Hunt inscribed on the first 
leaf of a presentation copy of Keats's poems. 

The pages of this volume also are worn at the 
edges, and, in spite of a second binding, it will 
afflict no lover of books by too great freshness. 

There is a letter from Coleridge laid between 
its leaves, a feast one comes upon in turning 
them, as if quite by chance. It is " very 
characteristic," as catalogues say. There is one 
also by Shelley, a few pages further on, that is 
brief, and at first sight not at all characteristic. 
He writes: 

" Dear Sir, Enclosed is a check for (within a 
few shillings) the amount of \-our bill. Can't 
you make the Booksellers subscribe more of 
the Poem ? 

Your most obedient serv. 

Percy Bysshe Shelley. 
"Jan. i6, 1818." 

The autograph of Keats in this volume is a 
part of the first draught of the poem, " I stood 
tip-toe upon a little hill," the motto of which 
poem is a line by Leigh Hunt. 

" Places of nestling green for poets made." 




Af 4 % 




S:i:^i!i.'4iii 



«4 ?^ 





5 ■^y>^'9o "t^^-^ fv>f^pyo 



44 



A Shelf of Old Books 



The autograph is marked as received by Mr. 
Fields from his friend Charles Cowden Clarke. 
The name of Keats's schoolfellow calls to mind 
a line from " The Eve of St. Agnes " for Avhich 
Clarke was responsible. It seems, even in their 
school-days, Clarke had access to a piano ; and 
in after years, when Keats was one day reading 
to him from the poem, which was still in manu- 
script, the line, 

"Tlie hall door shuts again, and all the noise is gone," 

" That line," he said, " catne into my head 
when I remembered how I used to listen in 
bed to your music at school." 

But Keats's autograph in this volume of the 
three poets is of unusual value ; not only be- 
cause it contains certain lines beloved by all 
readers of poetry, but because we gain a glimpse 
into the very workshop of the poet's brain. 
The lines now stand : 

" Open afresh your round of starry folds, 
Ye ardent Marigolds!" 

But we see how he toiled after the perfected 



Leigh Hunt 



45 



loveliness of these verses when we study his 
manuscript. He starts off, 

"Come ye bright Marigolds," 

and then his impatient pen dashes out the 



64 



COLERIDGE'S PO 



^ Sometimes, a-droppirij; from the sky. 
I heard the sky-lark sin|; ; 
Sometimes all lidle birds that are. 
How they sccm'd to fill the sea and air. 
With their sweet jargoning! 



And now 't was like all instrument s, 

""IN'ow like a lonely tlute^ 

And now it is an angel's song . 
' Ihal makes tli£ Heavens be mute . 

jt ceased ; yet still the saiU ma^P on 
'A pleasant noise till : 



In the leafy month of June 

Tjiat 10 the sleopinfT woods all nmlit 



Singeth a quiet tune. 



From Leigh Hunt's Annotated Copy of Coleridge's Foems. 

passage, and he begins again. At last the right 
words came, and he knew them and was content. 
Writing of books, Charles Lamb says some- 
where: " Reader, if haply thou art blessed with 
a moderate collection, be shy of showing it ; or 
if thy heart overfloweth to lend them, lend thy 
books ; but let it be to such an one as S. T. C. 



46 A Shelf of Old Books 



— he will return them (generally anticipating 
the time appointed) with usury ; enriched with 
annotations tripling their value. I have had 
experience." In his turn, Coleridge receives in 
this volume the like tribute of annotation from 
Leigh Hunt. Line after line is underscored 
with an emphasis that will not let you turn the 
page till you have read them. The lovely pas- 
sages seem to gain at least a double value from 
his signs of admiration. 

It is dangerous to gather flowers in such 
fields! They rise in crowds about us, and we 
regret a seeming partiality. When we come to 
" Kubla Khan," hardly a line escapes Hunt's 
index ; we seem to read certain things with him 
for the first time, and are startled by their won- 
drous beauty. " Youth and Age," " A Day 
Dream," " The Ancient Mariner," and " Christa- 
bel," are, of course, especially marked, as if he 
really could not contain his wonder and his 
delight. 

In returning to Leigh Hunt's own poems, we 
are still able, as I have said, to trace the origin 
of many an inspiration back to these old books. 



Leigh Hunt 47 



Among his productions one of the first in 
value is certainly that beautiful brief story of 
Abou Ben Adhem. The matter of this poem 
lies like an embedded jewel in the BibliotJicquc 
Orientale. We have only to read the two or 
three long prose paragraphs contained therein, 
giving the history of Abou, to wonder even 
more than ever at the transmitting power of 
Hunt's poetic pen. It is dull reading enough, 
compared with the poem. 

The book, however, is a precious one, in spite 
of its prosaicisms, or perhaps because of them ; 
for not only does it contain the seed-grain of 
"Abou Ben Adhem," but the suggestion of 
another of Hunt's best poems may be found in 
its pages. " The Trumpets of Doolkarnein " is 
a longer poem and far less known than "Abou 
Ben Adhem," but it was Longfellow's favorite 
among the works of Leigh Hunt. Of his 
copies of Theocritus, Redi, and Alfieri, all 
kindred spirits to his own, and inciters in his 
mind to fresh poetry, there is no room to write. 
Readers of Leigh Hunt's books will see how 
unaffectedly he delighted in these authors, and 
how much he drew from them. 



48 A Shelf of Old Books 



But before closing the volume of his own 
poetry, we must recall that charming rondeau 
about Mrs. Carlyle, who was so much more 
delightful a cause of inspiration than even 
our old books ! 

"Jenny kissed me when we met, 

Jumping from the chair she sat in ; 
Time, you thief, who love to get 

Sweets into your list, put that in : 
Say I'm weary, say I'm sad, 

Say thai health and wealth have missed me, 
Say I'm growing old, but add, 

Jenny kiss'd me." 

In his Autobiography Leigh Hunt says, 
speaking of his school-days : " My favorite 
books out of school-hours were Spenser, Col- 
lins, Gray, and the Arabian Nights^ This last 
he has italicized, and it is a pleasure to find his 
copy among these volumes ; probably not the 
very same he read at school, but the one pre- 
sented, as the inscription on the title-page 
tells us, 

"To Vincent Leigh Hunt from his loving 
Father," 



Leigh Hunt 4^ 

and the one Leigh Hunt read many times in 
his later years. It is filled with those delicate 
strokes of the pen which he loved to draw, not 
only at the side of a favorite passage, but under 
every word, until the reader can seem to taste 
the savor with which he devoured them. The 
" Arabian Nights " never lost their fascination 
for him. At the end of the fifth volume he 
writes the following note : 

" Finished another regular reading of these 

enchanting stories, for I know not what time, 

but after ' many a time and ^//,'— September 
26, 1836. 

Leigh Hunt." 

He was then fifty-two years old. His notes 
in these volumes are extraordinary reading, 
because the childlikeness of his mind is so 
apparent in them. When he underlines a pas- 
sage like the following, we feel how the wonder 
was still a fresh one as he read. 

" When the smoke was all oict of the vessel, it 
reunited, and became a solid body, of which was 
formed a ge7iie tzvice as high as the greatest of 
giants.'' 



50 A Shelf of Old Books 

He evidently disapproves of the editor of 
this edition (i8ii) because he is inclined to 
moralize : " Why can't you let us judge for 
ourselves," he writes once, almost pettishly, in 
the margin. Again, when, about midnight, 
" Maimoune sprung lightly to the mouth of 
the well, to wander about the world, after her 
wonted custom," Leigh Hunt writes, with droll 
gravity, on the leaf : " Fairy princesses, who 
live in wells, must be of a different order of 
royalty from those who inhabit subterranean 
bowers." 

Nothing could be more characteristic or bring 
the poet before us in his true light more clearly 
than these fascinating notes. He takes it all so 
seriously, as, for instance, in these comments : 
" There is a curious mixture of noble and infe- 
rior taste in this description. The white pillars 
and embroideries of white and red roses on 
cloth of gold are exquisite ; and the balconies 
fitted up like sophas and looking out into gar- 
dens are fit for them. Not so the shop-full of 
roses, the coloured pebbles, the gilt brass and 
the fighting birds. There is doubtless, how- 
ever, a national truth in the picture which has 



Leigh Hunt 51 



an interest of its own." When the prince in 
the story " could not forbear expressing in his 
song that he knew not whether he was going 
to drink the wine she had presented to him or 
his own tears," Leigh Hunt's ready sympathy 
responds, " Graceful passion ! ! ! " A serious 
reader of our commonplace days can hardly 
repress a smile at this enthusiasm in the man 
of fifty-two, but perhaps the smile should be a 
sigh that we are incapable of these festal days of 
fancy. He holds out well, too, through the six 
volumes, embroidering them impartially with 
his notes. He discovers that "the author of 
these tales and Ariosto both selected China as 
the country of the most beautiful women in 
the world ! Angelica was a Chinese ; " and he 
remarks, busy editor that he was, upon a de- 
scription of the imprisonment of the Sultan's 
son : " Books, and an old tower, and quiet, are 
not the worst things that could have happened 
to him." 

King Bedir says in the tale : " It is not 
enough to be beautiful ; one's actions ought 
to correspond. . . ." 

"It is curious," says Leigh Hunt, "that this 



52 A Shelf of Old Books 



sentiment is so often lost sight of by others 
who have adventures with the beautiful fairies 
that figure in so many of these tales. The 
Eastern beauty seems allowed a certain quan- 
tum of rage and cruelty as a sort of moral Pin- 
money which she may spend without being 
accountable for it." " This picture," he writes 
on another page, "is in fine keeping; — a palace 
of black marble, a melancholy lady at a window, 
with torn garments, and a black cannibal for 
the master of the house." 

" An Oone ! " he exclaims again. " An addi- 
tion to one's stock of beings ! Pardon me 
Oone for forgetting thee. The pleasure of 
seeming to see thee for the first time ought 
to procure my forgiveness." 

But I must have done with copying these 
tempting notes, tempting because I seem to 
see Leigh Hunt again as I knew him in the 
flesh and heard him speak. For Ali Baba's 
sake, however, we must be forgiven one more 
extract. 

" Hail, dear old story, in coming to thee 
again for I know not the whatth time ! But 
why must our friend the editor, among his 



Leigh Hunt 5^ 



other changes (all painful even when right), be 
so very particular, and contemptuous of old 
associations, as to think it necessary to con- 
vert the word ' thieves ' into ' robbers ' ? ' The 
Forty Thieves,' that was the good old sound, 
and for my part I will say Forty Thieves, still, 
and forever, however I may be prevailed upon 
to write Alla-adi-Deen for Aladdin and Kum- 
mir al Zumman for Camaralzamen : and I do 
not think after all that I ivill do that." 

Leigh Hunt's book, "A Jar of Hone}- from 
Mount Hybla," is an excellent illustration of 
the way in which he utilized his reading. In 
the very first essay of the volume, the one 
entitled "A Blue Jar from Sicily and a Brass 
Jar from the 'Arabian Nights;' and what came 
out of each," he skilfully draws from the two 
jars, the one of blue china, which recalled Sicil- 
ian seas, and the one of brass, which recalled 
the Ufreet, such an epitome of the spirit of 
Theocritus and of the "Arabian Nights" that 
we enter perfectly for the moment into the 
circle of their delicate illusions. 

" In consequence of the word ' Sicilian,' by a 
certain magical process the inside of our blue 



54 A Shelf of Old Books 



jar became enriched beyond its honey. . . . 
Theocritus rose before us, with all his poetry. 
Johnson says that Milton and his 
friend were not ' nursed on the same hill,' as 
represented in Lycidas ; and that they did not 
* feed the same flock.' But they were, and 
they did ; . . . and very grievous it was 
for them to be torn asunder, to be deprived by 
death of their mutual delight in Theocritus, 
and Virgil, and Spenser." Leigh Hunt found 
Theocritus to be "a son of ^tna — all peace 
and luxuriance in ordinary, all fire and wasting 
fury when he chose it. He was a genius equally 
potent and universal." In support of his doc- 
trine he brings both virile and lovely things 
from the blue jar, and quotes enough to per- 
suade us to his belief. There is a translation 
of " The Feast of Adonis," to which the 
Syracusan gossips go and listen to the song 
of a Grecian girl, which shows his poetic 
hand : 

"Go, belov'd Adonis, go 
Year by year thus to and fro ; 
Only privileged demigod ; 
There was no such open road 



Leigh Hunt 55 



For Atrides ; nor the great 

Ajax, chief infuriate ; 

Nor for Hector, noblest once 

Of his mother's twenty sons ; 

Nor Patroclus, nor the boy 

That returned from taken Troy ; 

Nor those older buried bones, 

Lapiths and Deucalions ; 

Nor Pelopians, and their boldest ; 

Nor Pelasgians, Greece's oldest. 

Bless us then, Adonis dear, 

And bring us joy another year. 

Dearly hast thou come again, 

And dearly shalt be welcomed then." 

With respect to the brass jar, the reader is 
called upon to remember how " eighteen hun- 
dred years after the death of Solomon a certain 
fisherman, after throwing his nets to no pur- 
pose, and beginning to be in despair, succeeded 
in catching a jar of brass. . . , He took a 
knife and worked at the tin cover till he had 
separated it from the jar. Then he shook the 
jar to tumble out whatever might be in it, 
and found in it not a thing. So he marvelled 
with extreme amazement. But presently there 
came out of the jar a vapour, and it rose up 



56 



A Shelf of Old Books 



towards the heavens, and reached along the 
face of the earth ; and after this the vapour 
reached its height, and condensed and became 
— an Ufreet. . . ." " Here," says Leigh 
Hunt, " is an Ufreet as high as the clouds, 
fish that would have delighted Titian (they 
were blue, white, yellow, and red), a lady, full 



193 



POiaiS ATTRIBUTBI) TO CHAUCER. 



yUf ii 



r!" falleth for a gentleman 
To say the best that he can 
Alwaies in mannes absence, 
And the sooth in his presence. 

It commeth by kind of gentil blood 
To cast away all heavinesse, 
And gader togither words good, 
The werk of wisdome beareth witnesse. 



One of Leigh Hunt's Annotations. 

dressed, issuing out of a kitchen wall, a king, 
half-turned to stone by his wife, a throne given 
to a fisherman, and a half-dozen other phenom- 
ena, all resulting froin one poor brazen jar,'' with 
which indeed his own fancy has achieved won- 
ders. 

It is by reading after Hunt and observing the 
way in which his mind played over a variety of 



Leigh* Hunt 57 



subjects, that we recognize the truth of Car- 
lyle's tribute when he called him "A man of 
genius in a very strict sense of the word, and 
in all the senses which it bears or implies." 

If it were only by the token of his enthusi- 
asm, by the power of lighting his torch at the 
great shrines and of inspiring others, Leigh 
Hunt's name should be held in remembrance ; 
and it is with a feeling akin to pity that we see 
him mentioned in a late life of John Keats as a 
man of "second-rate powers." We feel pity 
for a writer who, in unfolding the loveliness 
of Keats's genius, has allowed his eyes to be 
blinded towards his friend and contemporary. 
That Hunt's gifts were second to those of 
Keats, no one can deny ; but that they were 
second-rate powers in themselves, the record 
which he has left in his Autobiography and 
other works must forever disprove. 

Among the volumes of the English poets 
upon our shelf formerly belonging to Leigh 
Hunt, we find his Chaucer thoroughly marked 
and annotated. " He was one of my best 
friends," he said once. At the end of the 
eighth volume he has written : " Finished my 



58 A Shelf of Old Books 

third regular reading of this great poet and 
good-hearted man, whom I admire more than 
ever." The Chaucer notes are too full and too 
minute to be quoted, especially as in his " Spec- 
imens of Chaucer," collected in " The Seer," we 
find much of the material digested and pre- 










aoiA iW-r- 



Written at the End of Leigh Hunt s Copy of Chaucer. 

served. It is seeing, as it were, the first rush 
of feeling in which the notes were written 
which makes them interesting to decipher, but 
his published essays contain the gist of his 
recorded thought. 

His copy of Ben Jonson is a quaint posses- 
sion, full of new suggestions. But Ben Jonson 
with Hunt's notes is sufificient for a paper by 



Leigh Hunt 59 



itself, and in spite of the temptation to follow 
his lead in such pleasant pastures, we must pass 
on ; yet we cannot help rejoicing with him 
over striking passages, as we quickly turn the 
leaves ; for instance where, in the " Masque of 
Queens," he marks : 

" I last night lay all alone 
On the ground to hear the mandrake groan." 

I find one profitable bit of Hunt's autobiog- 
raphy on the margin of his copy of Boswell's 
Johnson. He says, in reference to a passage 
describing Johnson's "dejection, gloom, and 
despair," " I had it myself at the age of twenty- 
one, not with irritation and fretfulness, but 
pure gloom and ultra-thoughtfulness, — constant 
dejection; during which however I could trifle 
and appear cheerful to others. I got rid of it 
by horseback, as I did also of a beating of the 
heart. I had the same hypochondria afterwards 
for four years and a half together. In both 
cases I have no doubt that indigestion was at 
the bottom of the disease, aggravated by a timid 
ultra-temperance. I never practised the latter 
again, and the far greater part of my life has 



6o A Shelf of Old Books 



been cheerful in the midst of my troubles. I 
have, however, not been a great or luxurious 
feeder, and I have been cheerful on system as 
well as inclination. My childhood was very 
cheerful mixed with tenderness ; and I had 
many illnesses during infancy. I think I owe 
my best health to the constant and temperate 
regimen of Christ Hospital. During both my 
illnesses the mystery of the universe perplexed 
me ; but I had not one melancholy thought on 
religion." 

When we recall Johnson's criticisms of Mil- 
ton's poetry, the following note is agreeable to 
our sense of truth. It is written upon a page 
where Johnson has been saying that " had Sir 
Isaac Newton applied himself to poetry, he 
could have made a fine epic poem ; / could 
as easily apply to law as to tragic poetry." 
" Surely the company must have been laugh- 
ing here," says Leigh Hunt. " Could Johnson, 
who had no ear, have made a musician? With 
no eye, a painter ? " 

But no seductions by the way should lead to 
the copying of these notes apart from the text, 
especially while so long a row of books stands 



A 



wm 




ui- 










/ 



;*jii 



The Grave of Shelley, in Rome. 



Leigh Hunt 63 



unmentioned and beckons us to give them at 
least a nod of recognition. 

Of Leigh Hunt's copy of Milton, Mr. Fields 
writes : " I am pained to observe in my friend's 
library several broken sets of valuable books. 
One of her copies of Milton, of which author 
she has some ten different editions, has a gap 
in it, which probably will never be filled again. 
Gone, I fear, forever, is that fourth volume, 
rich in notes in the handwriting of him who 
sang of ' Rimini ' and ' Abou Ben Adhem.' " 

Boston's long-loved teacher, George B. Emer- 
son, used to say to his pupils, " Lending books 
is a most expensive luxury." In consequence 
of this indulgent temper. Hunt's Milton stands 
shorn of the fourth volume, containing a part 
of " Paradise Lost." The volumes that remain 
are much interlined and commented, but we 
miss the first and second books of the great 
poem all the more because he has so enriched 
the portions that are left to us. " L'Allegro " 
and "II Penseroso" he considers "the hap- 
piest of Milton's productions." We can easily 
understand how congenial their loveliness 
would be to Leigh Hunt. He especially ob- 



64 A Shelf of Old Books 



serv^es in " L'AlIegro " the passage containing 
the lines : 

"While the ploughman near at hand 
Whistles o'er the furrowed land, 
And the milkmaid singeth blithe, 
And the mower whets his scythe, 
And every shepherd tells his tale 
Under the hawthorn in the dale." 

Warton in a note reminds us that the " late 
ingenious Mr. Headley suggested that the 
word tale does not here imply stories told by 
shepherds, but that it is a. technical term for 
numbering sheep." Leigh Hunt adds: "This 
explanation would probably be rejected by 
most young readers at first, as interfering with 
their Arcadian luxuries ; and might even be 
unkindly regarded by older ones for the same 
reason : but it will be adopted by every grown 
reader of poetry at last." 

The line 

" Bosom'd high in tufted trees," 

was evidently a favorite ; also those, 

" Untwisting all the chains that tie 
The hidden souls of harmony." 



Leigh Hunt 65 



Of "II Penseroso " he says: "This word 
ought always to be spelt pensicroso, and not 
in its present way, which is certainly not the 
common one with Italian writers, and I am 
told is not to be found in them at all." 

Many books still look at us from Leigh 
Hunt's group, and there are interesting things 
for book-lovers still to be found among them. 
There is his copy of Plato's "Republic;" of 
Emerson's " English Traits," the notes in which 
gave Emerson himself much amusement ; Car- 
lyle's " French Revolution," and others. Sadi, 
and the English poets, and Sterne were all evi- 
dently favorite reading. There is a freshness 
like that of a June rose in Hunt's delight in 
good books to the very end, and the same 
freshness is to be found in his own work. We 
are sorry to think that he is not much read 
or known by the younger generation, and 
perhaps if it were understood how little the 
term " old-fashioned " applies to him, he would 
be more eagerly sought. Many a young lover 
of books would sympathize with the writer, if 
the pages of " Imagination and Fancy " were 
once opened in a quiet corner. 



66 A Shelf of Old Books 



He was himself compact of imagination and 
fancy, and his autobiography is a book which 
is pretty sure to be safe against the great 
robber Time. Whatever detraction Leigh 
Hunt suffered, the bird still sang on, in spite 
of finding himself caged and in spite of the 
clipping of his wings. 

His father was a British colonist in America 
at the time of our war for independence, and 
took the side of the loyalists with such fer\'or 
that he nearly lost his life. He fled to Bar- 
badoes, and afterward to England, where he 
hved a strange wandering life with his wife 
and children. One may say with truth that 
Leigh Hunt's misfortunes began long before 
he was born. His life was in strange contrast 
to that of the other distinguished poets of his 
time. He had, what they had not, a hand-to- 
hand fight with poverty from the beginning 
to the end of his long life, and although he 
was the intimate friend of Byron and Shelley 
and Keats, and well known to the rest of that 
shining group, his " problems " were unlike 
theirs, and his term of struggle one that lasted 
into old age. They died early, having won 



Leigh Hunt 67 

name and fame ; but Leigh Hunt drank the 
bitter cup of existence to the dregs. All the 
more, therefore, in spite of the harshness of 
personal and literary criticism, it is a genuine 
happiness to the reader of to-day to discover 
a few beautiful and enduring poems which 
will embalm his name forever ; and still further, 
to recognize his leadership in letters, by which 
other men are brought to the fountain of in- 
spiration and sustainment. 



EDINBURGH 



Illilf' 



"%- 










Scott. (From an original unpublished drawing in cliall< by Stuart Newton, now in possession of 
Mrs. George D. Howe.) 



EDINBURGH 

As we find ourselves quitting one shelf of old 
books and turning to another, we seem for the 
moment to be leaving behind us Leigh Hunt, 
Shelle}% and Keats, three names to conjure 
with, three presences from which we turn un- 
willingly. But near by we see the names (we 
were on the point of saying the faces, so real 
these familiars are to us) of the men Avho have 
made Edinburgh forever one of the best be- 
loved of all cities. 

Samuel Rogers once said: "The most mem- 
orable day, perhaps, which I ever passed was 
in Edinburgh — a Sunday, when after breakfast- 
ing with Robertson, I heard him preach in 
the forenoon, and Blair in the afternoon, then 
took coffee with the Piozzis, and supped with 
Adam Smith." 

During more generations than we can reckon 



72 A Shelf of Old Books 



here, Edinburgh held her high preeminence, and 
if the tide of life has swept at length too 
strongly toward London, the maelstrom of Eng- 
land, a brooding mantle of remembrance will 
always hang over Edinburgh and make her 
landscape beautiful. A glance at any time 
toward this corner of the library will bring 
back the face and voice of Dr. John Brown, 
the author of " Spare Hours," of " Rab and 
his Friends," and of " Pet Marjorie." The 
book that stands nearest to our hand happens 
to be a copy of Byron's " Don Juan," and I can 
see the book again as I saw it first, standing in 
Dr. Brown's library at 23 Rutland Street, the 
spot which of late years, after the home of Sir 
Walter Scott at 39 Castle Street, has become 
the place in all Edinburgh where the feet of pil- 
grims to literary shrines love best to linger. It 
was a true doctor's house, and reminded me of a 
New England Boston home of thirty years ago. 
The humanities were all alive in it, and the 
de-humanizing quality of much of our high art 
in drawing-rooms had not found its way there. 
Plenty of books covered the walls on their plain 
unenclosed shelves, and other literary curiosi- 



Edinburgh •y^ 

ties besides the "Don Juan" had found an 
appreciative resting-place upon them. This 
volume is indeed a curiosity. On the side 
is printed in gold letters: 

Lord Byron's Copy. 

Don Juan 
Cantos III. IV. V. 

and two branches of laurel cross their stems 
beneath the inscription. 

Inside Dr. Brown has written his own name 
and the following words : 

"August 1864 given me by Caroline Scott. 
June 1 8th 1869 

To James T. Fields 

from his friend 
J. B." 

Turning the leaf I find still another inscrip- 
tion, as follows: 

" The writing on the opposite page is by the 
hand of Lord Byron. 

John Murray Jan 25 39" 



74 A Shelf of Old Books 



And on the opposite leaf Byron has writ- 
ten : 

" The Publisher is requested to reprint (pro- 
A'ided the occasion should occur) from tliis copy 
— as the one most carefully gone over by the 
Authour. The Authour repeats (as before) that 
the former impressions (from whatever cause) 
are full of errours. And he further adds that 
he doth kindly trust — with all due deference 
to those superior persons — the publisher and 
l^rinter — that they will in future — less misspell 
— misplace — mistake — and mis-everything, the 
humbled M.S.S. of their humble servant. 

Ocf 26'^ 1821 " 

After this ungraceful peroration Byron pro- 
ceeds to make such corrections as seem good to 
him throughout the pages with his own hand. 

As I have said, there were many other inter- 
esting books in Dr. Brown's own collection, for 
he was the true son of his father, into whose 
reverent hands such things were always gravi- 
tating — but he was also one of the most gener- 
ous of men, as those of us have good reason to 
know who look over this shelf of books. He 




DON JUAN. 




A Note to his Publisher, John Murray, written by Lord Byron in his copy 
" Don Juan." [Reduced fac-sinnile.] 



76 A Shelf of Old Books 



was aware what he was doing when he gave 
away one of his treasures, his regard for them 
being an inheritance not only from his father 
but also from his great-grandfather, the famous 
John Brown of Haddington. Chief among his 
treasures he held to be a certain Greek Testa- 
ment, concerning which he has said: "I pos- 
sess, as an heirloom, the New Testament, which 
my father fondly regarded as the one his grand- 
father, when a herd-laddie, got from the Profes- 
sor Avho heard him ask for it, and promised him 
it if he could read a verse." 

This chief possession, inherited thus directly, 
was accompanied by others from the paternal 
shelves. He tells us that his father began to 
collect books when he was about twelve years 
old, and that among his treasures were " Ulric 
von Hutton's autograph on Erasmus's beauti- 
ful folio Greek Testament, and John Howe's 
(spelt How) on the first edition of Milton's 
Speech on Unlicensed Printing ; " also a very 
interesting copy of Baxter's Life and Times 
which had belonged to Anna Countess of 
Argyll, with a note in it of historic value, be- 
sides her autograph. The old story thus renews 







Rev. John Brown, father of Dr. Browr 



78 A Shelf of Old Books 

itself, and we must go behind a perfected per- 
sonality like Dr. John Brown's in order to 
understand it. Even as I sit, with the photo- 
graph before me of his full-length figure 
holding his dog, and the memory of his pres- 
ence clearly before that '' inner eye," the pen 
still delays and hesitates in the attempt to 
describe him as he was. The fine skull, the 
tender in-seeing eyes, the firm mouth yet 
ready to break into fun with one of the earliest 
or latest Scottish anecdotes, all this we see and 
hear, and yet fail to portray him to those who 
knew him not. One of the books which he 
gave us in the early days of our friendship was 
the biography of his father by Dr. Cairns, a 
book which true lovers of biography even at 
this date may pore over with absorbing inter- 
est ; and among his own published papers, 
as we all remember, is a letter of gratitude 
to Dr. Cairns containing reminiscences of his 
father, which came too late to be included 
in Dr. Cairns' book. In these we find the 
seed-grain of much that is in his own nature, 
the foundation of his own faiths and tastes. 
Even in the portrait of his father we see, 




Dr. John Brown of Edinburgh. (After a photograph from life.) 



Edinburgh 8i 



though they were such different men, a great 
likeness. The famous preacher and scholar had 
not the brawny Scottish physique which might 
well serve a man ready to engage in this most 
difficult of all professions, but he possessed on 
the contrary a constitutional refinement of 
body as well as of mind, and was capable 
of intense self-excitement and of consequent 
silence and self-w^ithdrawal, if not of actual 
depression. " There was a fountain of ten- 
derness in his nature," writes Dr. Cairns, " as 
well as a sweep of impetuous indignation." 
Might this not be said of the author of " Rab " 
as well ? " The union of these ardent elements 
. . . not untouched with melancholy," the 
biographer continues, " with the patience of the 
scholar and the sobriety of the critic formed 
the singularity and almost the anomaly of his 
personal character." This too was the nature 
of his son, but there was also a love for others, 
a homely drawing to his kind which distin- 
guished him from his father, and which en- 
deared him in turn, not alone to those who 
knew him, but to all who read him. He 
speaks of remembering well how his father 
6 



82 A Shelf of Old Books 



would sit up by night, after his mother's death, 
and pore over his books while he lay tucked 
away in the warm bed. " My father's bed was 
in his study, a small room, with a very small 
grate. ... I can remember often awaking 
far on in the night or morning, and seeing that 
keen, beautiful, intense face bending over these 
Rosenmiillers and Ernestis, and Storrs and 
Kuehnoels — the fire out, and the gray dawn 
peering through the window ; and when he 
heard me move, he would speak to me in the 
foolish words of endearment my mother was 
wont to use, and come to bed and take me, 
warm as I was, into his cold bosom." 

" Warm as he was : " perhaps these words 
describe his nature better than more studied 
phrase. He seemed born to cherish this 
warmth both for man and beast, and when he 
grew to manhood he loved to gather the lonely 
and the suffering to his breast, as his father once 
gathered him. And when Dr. Brown quotes 
Sir Walter Scott calling for " Pet Marjorie," 
and saying, " Where are ye, my bonnie wee 
coodlin' doo," we feel that he himself would 
have called Marjorie with those words, and 



/ 






Si 






^?-^^; 




-^^^-- 



Davm Duugici, E=,H., EJ,,,L. 



Edinburgh 85 



would have gathered her so into his own bosom. 
Calm and quiet as Dr. Brown was in appear- 
ance, a critic, too, by education, a man subject 
to dark periods of depression during the last 
twenty years of his life, no one could approach 
him, either man or dog, without that sense of 
a Avarm human breast open and ready to shelter 
and make warm. 

One day in the early summer of i860, we 
took the morning train from Edinburgh to 
Melrose. A heavy shower was falling that ren- 
dered the prospect for a day out of doors 
rather disappointing ; but we were so full of 
interest in everything around us that we took 
little heed of the weather. At one of the way 
stations, a kindly, breezy man leaped hurriedly 
into our carriage, nodding to us in a cheerful 
fashion, and then almost without pause he 
began a friendly talk, catching speedily at the 
idea of what would chiefly interest us as Amer- 
icans. " Can you tell us anything of a man in 
Edinburgh who has written a book called 
'Hora; Subsecivs'?" we asked. "Oh, yes," 
he replied, " he is my brother, and I will give 
you a note to him with pleasure." But almost 



86 A Shelf of Old Books 



as suddenly as he came he leaped out of the 
carriage again and was away, for he too was a 
busy physician like the Edinburgh doctor. At 
evening, however, when our sight-seeing was 
finished and we were about to return to Edin- 
burgh, we saw him waiting at the station with 
a "good speed " for us and with the letter in 
his hand. 

And thus we found ourselves shortly after at 
Dr. Brown's tea-table, with the family, not for- 
getting his friendly doggie " Dick." 

I can well recall how rich we felt as we came 
away after that first visit ; rich first of all in 
his friendship, and again rich in the memory of 
good things which had fallen from his lips, rich 
above all with that sense of a generous nature 
which gives and gives and still hath all. I 
remember that Mr. David Douglas was present 
and helped to make the occasion agreeable, for 
Dr. Brown was a man of " infinite humor " and 
full of anecdote, and he and Mr. Douglas 
added Scottish wit to Scottish tale till the time 
could hold no more. 

Even then a great shadow had fallen upon 
Dr. Brown, and the new thoughts which were 



Edinburgh 87 



awakened by this visit and the httle excitement 
seem to have been helpful to him. He wrote 
two letters on the following day to his new 
friends, in the first of which he confesses to 
have lain awake a good part of the night think- 
ing over many things, but adds, in his own 
kindly fashion, '' we had not been so happy for 
many a day." 

In this same letter he adds something which 
may be considered a dramatic episode indeed 
for autograph lovers : " I am quite sorry that I 
cannot give you the manuscript of ' Rab.' Only 
three days ago I found it in my desk and 
threw it into the waste basket, and by this time 
it is in ashes and up the chimney." 

It was not until January of the following 
year that he wrote to us about his wife's health 
in unmistakable terms. He said : " My dearest 
is still with us, but going down more and more 
into darkness ; sweet and good and full of 
love, but almost beyond the reach of our love. 
In the story of Rab the words, ' Why was that 
gentle, modest, sweet woman, clean and lova- 
ble, condemned by God to bear such a burden,' 
are her own. They occurred in a letter to me 



A Shelf of Old Books 



about Ailie ; how terribly true they now are of 
her own beloved self. ... I go about in a 
dream, but the stroke will come some day and 
awake me." 

Two or three months later he again referred 
to " the great sorrow under which we lie, in the 
loss of the reason of my dear wife. She was 
away from us when we saw you. . . . One 
of the last things my dear wife enjoyed, and 
parts of which she repeats, was Whittier's 
' Witch's Daughter.' 

" Often I heard her saying, gently to herself : 

' And the winds whispered 
It is well.'" 

Among the books given to us by Dr. Brown 
are two volumes containing the Essays and 
Lectures of his cousin, Samuel Brown. It was 
through Ralph Waldo Emerson that his name 
Avas first made known to readers in Boston. 
Mr. Emerson possibly became acquainted with 
Samuel Brown as early as the time of his first 
visit to Carlyle, for the father of Samuel was a 
distinguished man in his day, a " Secession " 
minister and a native of Haddington. 



Edinburgh 89 

I well remember the sense of awe which 
came over me when Emerson described this 
brilliant creature, of whom his cousin says : 
" His letters and his journal, and above all, 
his living voice and presence, could alone tell 
what was best in him ; there was a swiftness 
and a brightness about his mind and its ex- 
pression such as we never before witnessed ; 
its penetrative, transmitting power seemed like 
that of lightning in its speed and keenness. 
With this brightness, and immediateness and 
quickness of mind, there was great subtlety — a 
power of expressing almost impossible thoughts, 
of working upon invisible points, which was 
quite marvellous—; . . . a venatic instinct 
for first principles, a sort of pointing at them 
as a dog does at game ; ' that instinctive grasp,' 
as has been finely said, 'which the healthy 
imagination takes of possible truth ; ' and along 
with this a hard, remorseless logic, and a 
genuine love and practice of method, in its 
Coleridgean sense, as distinguished from sys- 
tem." 

All this Emerson had recognized in the man, 
and he joined in the ranks of those who stood 



90 A Shelf of Old Books 



about Samuel Brown, waiting the success which 
seemed sure to follow his scientific theory and 
labors. He was candidate for the chair of 
Chemistry in the University of Edinburgh when 
he was twenty-six years old, but before the 
time for his election arrived a large company of 
learned men were invited to witness his experi- 
ments to prove " the proposition of the isom- 
erism of carbon and silicon." I can never 
forget Emerson's manner, the pain and wonder 
with which he described the utter failure of 
these experiments. It was a failure which 
meant ruin to this fair fabric of a life. All his 
learning and noble conduct were blasted with a 
breath. It was doubtless unjust, it w^as terrible, 
but it was the decision of the world, and it was 
final. Samuel Brown died at the early age of 
thirty-nine, withdrawn from public life, and suf- 
fering great physical agony. Dr. Brown says : 
" Time and the hour, which brings the sun up 
into the heavens, will doubtless bring him like- 
wise into his just place. But we cannot help 
recording our unvarying confidence in the specu- 
lative truth of his doctrine, and his own solemn 
assertion of this with his dying hand in his 



Edinburgh 91 



private journal; and though we speak as un- 
learned, we must affirm our original conviction 
of the essential truth of his doctrine of the unity 
of matter, and consequently of the possible, 
and, it may be, provable, transmutability of 
the so-called elementary bodies." 

Not a word is said in print anywhere, I 
believe, of this great sorrow, for such it was to 
a large Edinburgh circle, but we can read be- 
tween the lines and understand the scene as 
Emerson described it. The contrast is sharp 
indeed between the picture of the defeated 
scientist and the man of whom Dr. Brown says: 
" It would not be possible to indicate to any 
one who never saw him, or heard his voice, and 
came under the power of his personality, in 
what lay the peculiarity of Samuel Brown's 
genius ; — all who knew him, knew it, — none 
who did not, can. He was not so much 
cleverer or deeper than most men, — he was 
quite different ; it was as if a new flower had 
grown up, which no one ever before saw, and 
which no one looks for again." 

All this Emerson had seen, and none had felt 
more deeply; but later came that contrasting 



92 A Shelf of Old Books 

hour of the self-imposed test and the sudden 
failure which, for reasons inexplicable to us 
now, bore a sense almost of disgrace, so high 
had been the hope, so futile the attempt to 
prove it. But Samuel Brown still had great 
happiness left him in his private life. He had 
married his cousin, " and this," writes Dr. 
Brown, " was his greatest earthly blessing." 
To her we owe these books. They are doubt- 
less helping to pave the way for other discover- 
ers, but much of the great learning they con- 
tain must be already as matter sloughed off 
from the new creature. 

Dr. Brown continually recurs to this brilliant 
frustrated career. He says in one of his letters : 
" I send you a notice I wrote for T/ie Scotsman 
at the time of George Wilson's death. The 
part about Samuel Brown will interest you." 
And again : " You will see in the article on my 
cousin in the North British an extract from a 
Diary he kept. I believe that Diary, if Mrs. 
Brown would permit its publication, would 
give the world a better idea of what Samuel 
Brown's genius was than anything of his that 
has hitherto been published. . . . Here he 



Edinburgh 93 



was too much the prophet at home, aud there- 
fore not honored as I think he deserved. . . ." 

There is still another book on the shelf con- 
nected with the old Scottish days and Dr. 
Brown. It is a discourse by Nathaniel Cul- 
verwel, edited by the Rev. John Brown ; a 
book of which Sir William Hamilton said that 
" Culverwel did not deserve the oblivion into 
which he has fallen." Perhaps not, but has the 
world discovered any method for recovering 
whatever may fall into the waters of oblivion ? 
Dr. Brown wrote of it: "If you can find a 
young Jonathan Edwards, he would relish the 
non-conformist, neo-Platonist." But we have 
not found him yet, and the compact volume 
stands gathering dust to dust. 

As the mists and dark gathered about Dr. 
Brown's later years he wrote fewer letters, and 
though always with the same affectionateness 
yet with a cloud over his spirits from which he 
sometimes found it impossible to rally. 

"I am doing nothing now," he wrote, "but 
drudge and doctor — my little vein seems worked 
out, and I am too much involved in daily work, 
and too dull and careless now that my compan- 



94 A Shelf of Old Books 



ion is gone, to make myself do anything with 
m}- brain." But this mood was disease in 
part ; occasionally the clouds would lift, and he 
would write in a more cheerful vein. Of Dr. 
Holmes he says in one of his letters : " If 
Voltaire had been good and a New Englander 
he would have thus written. There is the 
same mastery of style, which means not only 
a poi7it — but means the point of a pyramid, 
the broader the deeper in. ... I wonder 
how that brain burns so unconsumingly ; is 
there a bit of asbestos in the hippocampus 
minor ? " 

In a yet gayer mood he wrote again of his 
dogs : " Don has been succeeded by a huge 
young English mastiff with a taAvny hide, close 
and short like a lion's. A muzzle as if dipped 
in ink, and a pedigree as thoroughbred as Lord 
Derby's. I call him Kent, partly from his 
county — partly because I always think Lear's 
faithful servant was a sort of human mastiff. 
He is of Lord Kingsdowne's breed, and as 
good a dog as his Lordship is a lawyer." 

It is hard to cut the letters of a friend, and 
harder yet where the subjects of which he 



Edinburgh 95 



writes are so full of interest to many people, 
but his own books recall us to the shelves 
where the various editions of " Horas Sub- 
secivje " are to be found. 

These " Spare Hours " of a physician's life 
are, after all, the work by which he will be 
remembered in this world. The power and 
tenderness of the written page touch men from 
afar as his healing hand could touch them in 
the chamber of suffering. These are all the 
world can have who did not know him, and 
how much they are ! these " bits " and " scraps," 
as he so often called them. His larger record 
lies hidden among the secrets to be revealed in 
the Great Future. 

A smaller book next attracts our attention, 
in dark covers neatly lettered, " Lights and 
Shadows of Scottish Life." It is a volume of 
brief sketches by John Wilson, and one which 
will outlive many of the more voluminous 
books of his later years. The name of Francis 
W. P. Greenwood is inscribed in a careful hand- 
writing within, with the date 1823. Bostonians 
will not love this copy the less that one of her 



96 A Shelf of Old Books 

most spiritual and best beloved ministers of 
the old King's Chapel owned it, loved it, and 
turned its pages. 

"Christopher North" was one of the most 
striking figures which even the streets of Edin- 
burgh, Avonted to the figures of unusual men, 
had ever seen. De Quincey used to say of him 
" that it was good to dwell in his shadow." 
Mr. Fields said that the Opium-eater being 
one of the smallest of men in stature, and 
Wilson taller and broader than his race, he 
supposed the little man felt a physical security 
beside him. " I remember," he continued, 
" that De Quincey described to me a visit he 
once made with the Professor to Paris. His 
account was full of droll situations ; and one of 
the incidents left on my mind was the recital 
of an encounter between young Wilson and a 
Frenchman. ' We were sitting in the theatre 
together,' said De Quincey, ' when to my sur- 
prise a quarrel arose between my companion 
and a stranger on the other side next him. 
The Frenchman became so obnoxious that 
Wilson begged him to be quiet until the play 
was over, when they could step outside the 



Edinburgh 



97 




John Wilson ("Christopher North" 



theatre into an alley hard by, and settle the 
dispute.' ' And did they go out and arrange 
the misunderstanding? ' I asked. 'Oh, yes,' said 

7 



A Shelf of Old Books 



De Quincey. ' And what was the result ? ' De 
Quincey looked up in his mild and pensive way 
and replied with great solemnity and compos- 
ure of muscle, ' The Professor closed both the 
little Frenchman's eyes, and thus eliminating 
his vision, the combat ended.' " 

John Wilson was one of the few great men 
whom Mr. Fields saw in his first boyish run 
through Europe. The young American had 
already acquainted himself with the incompar- 
able tales contained in this small volume, and 
probably suspected their author to be the 
editor of Blackzuood's Magazine. He appears 
to have known him also even then to be the 
writer of the " Noctes." The Professor re- 
ceived him \vith great kindness at his house 
in Edinburgh, and in the course of the inter- 
view undertook to show his young guest how 
the Irish shillalah should be used. Finding 
his movements circumscribed and the wild 
fling rather dangerous in his study, he opened 
the front door, and bidding his guest follow 
him to the sidewalk, then and there proceeded 
to lay about him wnth the stick, entirely oblivi- 
ous of passers-by and their comments. " Chris- 



Edinburgh 99 



topher North " was always free and unconscious 
in his bearing and appearance. He usually 
wore a flannel shirt entirely open at the throat, 
and when he was among his Westmoreland 
hills the country people often met him of a 
morning with even his shirt thrown back from 
his brawny shoulders. 

Sir Henry Taylor, who met him once or 
twice in Edinburgh, says : " He looked like one 
of Robin Hood's compan}- ; or he might have 
been Robin himself — jovial but fierce — as if he 
would be the first at a feast but by no means 
the last at a fray ; full of fire and animal energy, 
and of wit and sarcasm, and hardly seeming to 
heed anybody about him — a man who has 
always been the king of his company. Moral 
philosophy was never taught by a wilder or 
more fiery Professor, and he was certainl)- by 
far the most considerable man I met with at 
Edinburgh." 

There is a beautiful old copy of the " Decam- 
erone " upon the shelf, given by Wilson to 
Leigh Hunt, with a friendly word or two writ- 
ten inside, and a letter from him also which I 
find laid within a copy of the " Vestiges of 



A Shelf of Old Books 



Creation."* Robert Chambers, through whom 
this letter of Christopher North came into our 
hands, says that it was given him, for Mr. 
Fields, by Professor Wilson's daughter, Mrs. 
Sheriff Gordon. " It is a very good letter," 
Mr. Chambers writes, " of that extraordinary 
genius," being one which he addressed to the 
wife of Mr. Solicitor General Rutherford on his 
daughter's marrying Mr. Gordon, who was the 
* This book, the "Vestiges," was almost as great a source 
of wonder in its time as The Letters of Junius, or " Waverley " 
itself. It appeared at a moment when the study of geology 
had made a narrow faith in the letters of the first chapter of 
Genesis impossible, and while the world was still rent with dis- 
sensions upon the subject. The concluding note of the book 
says : " Thus ends a book, composed in solitude, and almost 
without the cognizance of a single human being, for the sole 
purpose (or as nearly so as may be) of improving the knowl- 
edge of mankind, and through that medium their happiness. 
For reasons which need not be specified, the author's name is 
retained in its original obscurity, and in all probability will 
never be generally known. . . . The book, as far as I am 
aware, is the first attempt to connect the natural sciences into 
a history of creation. The idea is a bold one, and there are 
many circumstances of time and place to render its boldness 
more than usually conspicuous. . . . We give, as is meet, 
a respectful reception to what is revealed through the medium 
of nature, at the same time that we fully reserve our reverence 



Edinburgh loi 

nephew of that lady's husband. " By the way," 
Mr. Chambers continues, " Mrs. Gordon is writ- 
ing a memoir of her father, to be pubHshed by 
Edmonston & Douglas, of Edinburgh, and I 
hope you will deem it a work suitable for 
reprinting at Boston. I have a great faith 
in the memoir-writing powers of women — wit- 
ness Lady Holland's life of her father, Sydney 
Smith, and the sketch of Lord North by his 

for all we have been accustomed to hold sacred, not one tittle 
of which it may ultimately be found necessary to alter." 

The learning and common-sense of the book, its rare tem- 
perateness and wisdom, commanded immediate attention. It 
was the wonder of the world at that period, nor was the author- 
ship ever acknowledged, I believe. Therefore it is sincerely 
interesting to find in Leigh Hunt's copy traces of the author- 
ship and to know that Mr. Fields settled it definitely upon 
Mr. Chambers at last. 

The brothers William and Robert Chambers are indissolubly 
connected with reminiscences of Edinburgh. I remember see- 
ing them both in their native city while the elder brother was 
Lord Provost. Robert was our kind cicerone through his 
beloved haunts. No one should fancy it possible to see Edin- 
burgh properly without a reference to his admirable "Walks 
about Edinburgh,'' hut to have the knowledge fresh and yet 
uncoined from the author's brain was an excellent preventive 
to imperfect sight-seeing. 



A Shelf of Old Books 



daughter in Brougham's ' Statesmen of the 
Reign of George III.' " 

In this letter, which is now safely transferred 
to the Edinburgh edition of Wilson's Life, 
Christopher North writes: "Mary's marriage 
will be a sacred solace to her afflicted father, 



^i*^»lr 10^ 




William and Robert Chambers. 



and to know that she possesses the affection of 
her husband's dearest friends infuses a feeling 
of peace and joy into my desolate and too 
much disturbed heart. Her mother loved 
John Gordon — so do I — and if the Blest see 
those they have left, her spirit will be well- 
pleased to look down on their united life." 



Edinburgh 103 



Mr. Fields often recalled the scene (though I 
think it must have been described to him after- 
ward by one of the students who was present, 
perhaps Dr. John Brown) when Wilson came to 
resume his duties at the University the next 
session after the death of his wife. He began 
to speak to his class as usual, but feeling the 
sympathy of the young men he stopped and his 
head sank upon the desk. Presently he rose 
again and said : " Gentlemen, pardon me, but 
since we last met I have been in the valley of 
the shadow of death." The crowd of students, 
the breathless waiting, the tender confidence to 
them, was something never to be forgotten 
after hearing it described as from an eye- 
witness. 

Mr. Fields was present at some one of his 
lectures, however, and he always said in after 
life that Professor Wilson's method and man- 
ner with his students was his ideal of what the 
relation of a teacher to his scholars should be. 
The eager way in which he talked to them, his 
whole heart being in his work, made it impossi- 
ble for their thoughts to wander. They were 
fascinated by his living interest in their behalf. 



104 A Shelf of Old Books 

"Ah, that is what lecturing to students can be 
made," he was accustomed to say. 

I have found a few manuscript notes by Mr. 
Fields descriptive of Wilson, and among them 
the following paragraph in which we see how 
keen and quick were his literary acumen and 
his energy : 

" It was young John Wilson who first gave 
to Walter Scott the title of ' The Great Magi- 
cian,' by which name he was afterwards known 
to all the world ! It was young John Wilson 
who pointed out, in the pages of the Edinburgh 
Review, the beauties of * Childe Harold,' long 
before the voice of universal acclamation was 
heard in the land ; and he was one of the first 
to recognize the genius of Charles Dickens. 
At the age of seventeen he sent off a letter 
of several sheets to William Wordsworth, then 
unrecognized and hooted at by the reviewers, 
thanking the obscure poet up among the hills 
of Westmoreland for the ardent enjoyment he, 
a lad at school, had derived from a perusal 
of ' The Lyrical Ballads.' " 

Professor Wilson's home at EUeray was won- 
derfully^ beautiful. 



Edinburgh 



107 



" All Paradise 
Could by the simple opening of a door 
Let itself in upon him." 

De Ouincey thought it incomparably the fin- 
est terrace view in England or Wales. We are 
inclined to think that De Ouincey ought to 
have known, not only because he was a great 
wanderer, but because it is recorded of him that 
he once went to pass a day or two with Wilson 
at Elleray and remained nine months. '' Now 
and then as I went down-stairs at seven in the 
morning," Christopher North said, " I would 
meet De Quincey coming up to bed with a 
candle in his hand. He was a gentle, courte- 
ous creature." 

This singular visit of De Quincey at Elleray, 
where Wilson said he seldom saw him except 
thus in the morning, is much in keeping with 
Mr. Fields's own experience with respect to 
him. In his first inquiries after De Quincey, 
of an old man in Edinburgh, the reply was : 

" Ye've come to Edinbro' too late, sir ! 
They're nearly all gone, noo ! Man}''s the time 
I've seen Sir Walter Scott pass my door on his 
way to the court, and I got to ken the sound of 



io8 A Shelf of Old Books 

his stick on the sidewalk as well as I kenned 
the voice of my ain wife ! And there was Sir 
William Hamilton, the grand looking fellar, 
and Mr. Lockhart, Sir Walter's son-in-law, and 
little Mr. De Ouincey, the great opium-eater as 
some said of him, and Lord Jeffrey, the pow- 
erful lawyer, and Professor Wilson, a match for 
any of 'em ! " 

This inclusion of De Quincey among those 
who were past and gone was one of the eccen- 
tric incidents which surrounded that man of 
genius. When Mr. Fields inquired for him 
more particularly, he was assured of his death, 
although " after a search," he writes, " I found 
him alive and well in a cottage ten miles out of 
Edinburgh. I inquired for him again in Lon- 
don in 1852, and authors and critics, with very 
few exceptions, were uncertain where he lived, 
and one, a man of mark, declared to me that 
he then heard his name for the first time." 

It is already too well known for me to dwell 
upon it here, that the writings of Thomas De 
Quincey had never been collected until they 
were gathered together by Mr. Fields and 
printed in an edition of twenty-two volumes, 



Edinburgh 109 



published consecutively in Boston. This might 
well account for his being unknown in England 
by a busy writer, for " who read an American 
book" in those days? and these twenty-two 
volumes might be considered American, inas- 
much as De Quincey had never signed his 
papers in the English Reviews, which were 
therefore only discoverable by their style. 

De Quincey owned a large number of books, 
a part of which his daughters once told us 
were at a cottage in Westmoreland, called 
" Town-End," and others at Lasswade, near 
Edinburgh ; but a man of his strange habits, 
who kept his letters and manuscripts in a dis- 
used bath-tub, was not likely to watch closely 
over his books. After his death they were 
sacrificed, " sold for nothing," in a heap in 
Edinburgh, before his friends could be informed 
upon the subject. 

There is an interesting portrait of De Quin- 
cey, modelled in relief, hanging over the shelf 
of Edinburgh books, wdiich gives something 
more of the imaginative quality in his face 
than the picture by Sir John Watson Gordon, 
although the latter is more generally known. 



A Shelf of Old Books 



There is a very thhi volume also in the library- 
containing a portion of his essay on Words- 
worth in manuscript. The handwriting is deli- 
cate and refined as well as small and facile. 




De Quincey. (Fron 



OT Mrs. Fields.) 



This, with some of his letters, is all the shelves 
can show of De Ouincey's literary property ; 
but as he was living when Mr. Fields went to 
Edinburgh in 1852, I find a few unpublished 



Edinburgh 1 1 1 

reminiscences of a personal interview at that 
period. " We had corresponded at intervals for 
many years," Mr. Fields wrote, " because the 
collection of his writings in America had been 
intrusted to my care. He had never been able 
to afford me any assistance in indicating his 
essays in the magazines; as he had forgotten 
their existence as well as their dates, and I was 
obliged to rely entirely on a recognition of his 
style and the topics likely to be treated by him.* 
I found him living in his little roadside cottage 
a few miles from Edinburgh, at a place called 
Lasswade, on the river Esk. He had sent me 
directions how to find him in a letter which I 
still preserve as one of the curiosities of litera- 
ture. When he came out to receive me at his 
garden-gate I thought I had never seen any- 
thing so small and pale in the shape of a great 
man, nor a more impressive head on human 
shoulders. The unmistakable alabaster shine, 

* My husband was always grateful for the cooperation of 
Rufus Choate in discerning De Quincey's style. Mr. Choate's 
universal reading and his appreciation of De Quincey's elo- 
quence made him infallible in discovering any work of his 
hand. 



A Shelf of Old Books 



which I had noticed in other opium-eaters, was 
on his face, and the restlessness of his body 
also proclaimed his well-known habit. Next 
after his personal appearance I was struck with 
his exquisite courtesy. There was a finish and 
elegance in his diction also which recalled 
something of Leigh Hunt's manner, and be- 
longed perhaps to a particular era. I need 
hardly say that the habits of my host at Lass- 
wade were very eccentric. He soon began to 
describe, in the most solemn and deliberate 
manner, the nondescript animal which he said 
was forever gnawing in the interior of his 
body, forever moving, and forever busy at his 
ghastly work. It was profoundly sad to hear 
this wonderful genius, this master of all knowl- 
edge, talking at intervals such unreason, and 
with earnestness and power. . . . During 
a walk of fourteen miles which we took to- 
gether, his mind would sometimes dwell on 
the past, and I remember the delightful his- 
tory he gave me of those days among the hills 
of Westmoreland when his daily companions 
were Professor Wilson, Coleridge, and Words- 
worth. He had much to say also of the har- 










LJ^ Cry>J^ 6\4--h^ L^C^/>u^i'<<^^ 1 U^ i4^iil/'i^ 

Reduced Fac-simile of a Page from a Note by De Quincey to Mr. Fields. 



1 14 A Shelf of Old Books 



monies of language, the perfection of finish in 
English prose writers who had passed into 
fame, and he quoted to me Goethe's saying, 
that the difficulty in composition lies not in 
learning but in ////learning. Then he spoke of 
his own baffled efforts, his defeated hopes in 
life, of his unfinished work on the Human In- 
tellect, which he had longed to leave behind 
him completed as his crowning effort. Many 
things, too, he said to me in confidence which 
cannot be revealed. If they were true they 
ought never to be recorded, and if they were 
only the dreams of opium they should be al- 
lowed to fade like the unsubstantial visions of 
a deluded brain. He spoke of Charles Lamb 
and Southey with love and tenderness, and 
when he mentioned John Wilson his eyes 
filled and his voice trembled. 

" He asked many questions about America, 
and he understood the geography of our coun- 
try better than any untravelled American I had 
ever met. Webster's argument in the Salem- 
White murder case he thought contained the 
grandest utterances ever made in a court of 
justice. 



Edinburgh 1 1 5 



" As we walked along, his manner became at 
times singularly nervous and startling. Not 
infrequently he spoke like a man who had seen 
ghosts, and there was a kind of solemn awe 
and wonder in his tone. Much of the time 
he walked bareheaded, as if his brain were hot 
and troublesome, and I noticed there was on 
his brow that signature of sorrow not uncom- 
mon to the sons of genius. 

" He seemed to me to have accomplished 
nothing with his pen, great as his achieve- 
ments have been, compared to the eloquence 
and greatness of his spoken words. 

" When the time came for me to say ' good- 
night,' and return to Edinburgh, De Quincey, 
who had been talking all the evening in a strain 
of unequalled interest, began the prelude to a 
new theme. Although the carriage had long 
been waiting at the door, I was bound to hear 
and still lingered listening. At last, when the 
moment of departure arrived, De Quincey rose 
and said, in his solemn manner, ' I feel that at 
my period of life, and your home being three 
thousand miles away, the chances are against 
our ever meeting again. Send your carriage 



ii6 A Shelf of Old Books 



back to Edinburgh, and let us have a midnight 
walk to the city.' Not wishing to have him go 
so far as ten miles on foot, I proposed that he 
should then retire to bed and let me say ' fare- 
well.' This he declined peremptorily, and I 
then agreed that he should walk a few miles on 
with me, the carriage following our footsteps. 
It was a black, misty Scottish night, and as we 
trudged along 1 could hear the Esk River roar- 
ing at our side. De Quincey entered upon a 
fresh theme the moment we got out into the 
dark open country. The sight of cottages and 
other dwellings closed and cheerless in the mid- 
night gloom led him to speak of the household 
wrecks he had witnessed. Leading me up to 
the front of a large dilapidated mansion, as 
the wind whistled in at the broken windows, 
he described the hours of happiness he had in 
former years been accustomed to pass with 
those who had once dwelt in luxury within. 
Insanity, Fraud, Suicide, had entered at various 
epochs within these once radiant walls, ' and 
now,' said De Quincey, with a shuddering sigh, 
'behold the conquest of sorrow!' 

" We were many miles away from his own 



Edinburgh 117 



door and it was almost morning, when I took 
his hand for the last time, and under the 
shadow of the Scottish hills bade him farewell, 
as he glided off into the darkness toward Lass- 
wade. I watched his slight figure, vanishing, 
reappearing, vanishing, until it was lost in the 
mist — faded forever from my vision. 

" In after years when I stood by his grave 
in the Edinburgh churchyard and thought of 
his strange, struggling life, I recalled his own 
words about a battlefield that nature had long 
since healed and reconciled to herself under 
the tender oblivion of flowers." 

There is one old brown book upon the 
Edinburgh shelf connected with Robert Burns. 
Who can think of Edinburgh without a vision 
of his beautiful unhappy face rising up before 
us, " a miserable and mighty poet of the human 
heart " ? It is a copy of the first Edinburgh 
edition of his poems, the same for which the 
members of the Caledonian Hunt subscribed, 
taking one hundred copies, and which Burns 
said it gave him " so much real happiness to 
see in print." This copy was said to have 
been a eift from Burns to some woman, but I 



ii8 A Shelf of Old Books 



find no proof of this. It is interesting enough, 
however, with its list of grand names, and when 
we recall all the circumstances of its publica- 
tion. A small edition of his poems had been 
printed the year previous at Kilmarnock, and 
the rapidity with which it sold was a good 
promise for his poetic future. There was a 
" reprint and fac-simile " of this edition brought 
out in 1867, of which, also, only six hundred 
copies were made, and one of these reprints 
fortunately is now here before me. There is 
here a manuscript letter, too, from Burns, ad- 
dressed to Captain Hamilton, of Dumfries. 
It is a sorrowful letter enough, full of money 
troubles, and confirms what we already know 
of his misfortunes. 

Burns in Edinburgh, with his new leather- 
covered book, now looking so old and accord- 
ing to modern ideas so unattractive, was at the 
summit of his life's happiness. Mr. Fields 
often told how Burns was seen at that time by 
Mrs. Basil Montague, who later, in her old age, 
loved to describe him. She was herself just 
entering society as a young girl, she used to 
say, when Burns was enjoying the first-fruits 



Edinburgh 



iiq 



of his fame. " I have seen many a handsome 
man in my time," she would say ; " but none 




of them equalled young Robbie Burns. I 
never saw such a pair of eyes as flashed from 
under his noble forehead." 



I20 A Shelf of Old Books 

Burns had by no means grown up ignorant 
of books. In his father's cottage there were 
many volumes famous in those days, which 
were well read by the young son, but of 
poetry, except Fergusson's and Allan Ramsay's, 
there was nothing, save a collection of ballads 
and songs owned by a strange old woman who 
lived with them. He did not forget his love 
for the two poets who had helped to nurse his 
young genius, and the first places he is known 
to have visited in Edinburgh were the lowly 
grave of Fergusson and the house of Allan 
Ramsay. 

Among Mr. Fields's papers I find a page 
where he speaks of meeting one of the sons of 
Burns in London in 1859. " ^ asked him what 
made on him (as a boy) the deepest impression 
of his father's personality ? He said, ' The sym- 
pathetic tone of his voice whenever he spoke to 
any poor person, any one poorer and more suf- 
fering than himself.' " It was from the hand of 
this son that we received the daguerreotype of 
Burns taken from a portrait still, I believe, in 
possession of the family. 

Lockhart's description of Burns at this period 



Edinburgh 




Portrait of Ramsay. (From an edition of his poems published in 1751.) 



in Edinburgh, as given to him by Sir Walter 
Scott, Mr. Fields used to say was the one he 



A Shelf of Old Books 



liked above all others. Scott was a lad of fif- 
teen when Burns came up to receive the hom- 
age of his native country at the hands of all the 
distinguished men and women gathered in the 
classic city to welcome him. Young Walter 
was longing to see Burns, but as he had at that 
time small acquaintance with literary people it 
seemed as if he would nev^er have the coveted 
opportunity. " I would have given the world 
to know him," said Scott to Lockhart, and at 
last fortune favored the young lad. One day 
Professor Fergusson invited some persons to 
meet Burns at his house, and among them came 
the boy who was afterward to equal even Burns 
in the affectionate consideration of Scotland. 
" We youngsters," says Scott, '" sat silent and 
looked and listened." Some one was showing 
Burns an engraving hanging up in the room. 
It was a print representing a soldier lying dead 
in the snow, his dog sitting in misery on one 
side, and on the other the dead soldier's widow 
with a child in her arms. Underneath the en- 
graving these lines were printed : 

"Cold on Canadian hills or' Minden's plain, 
Perhaps that parent wept her soldier slain, 



Edinburgh 123 

Bent o'er her babe, lier eye dissolved in dew ; 
The big drops mingling with the milk he drew 
Gave the sad presage of his future years, 
The child of misery baptized in tears." 

Burns looked at the picture, read the Hnes, 
and burst into tears. He then asked who had 
written them. Nobody in the group except 
young Scott remembered the author's name, 
and he modestly whispered to a gentleman 
standing near that the lines occur in a half-for- 
gotten poem by Langhorne. The gentleman 
mentioned the fact to Burns and revealed his 
informant's name. Burns bent his brimming 
eyes on the boy and rewarded him with a look 
and a word of thanks which Walter Scott re- 
membered during his whole life. 

Burns's love for Allan Ramsay leads us to 
take tenderly down from the shelf the two 
small volumes of his poems. 

Ramsay died in 1757, and this edition was 
printed in London during his life, in 175 1. 
They are quaint leather-covered books, with an 
unpublished autograph poem by Ramsay on 
the first page. He was very popular in his day, 
and stopped a gap before the time of Scott and 



124 



A Shelf of Old Books 




Burns. He turned publisher, too, and became 
a rich man in spite of building a theatre and 
bringing righteous -Scotland down about his 
head. But he established the first circulating 



Pi-^Ac^^^^iu ^ /^»ii^ ^^"^t '^(^ /h^ 
^Z^i^ ^t-'^^i^^ Jk^firc^^sc^ #t^ri>i^^ 

Fac-simile of an Autograph Poem by Allan Ramsay, written on the first 
page of an edition of his poems. 



126 A Shelf of Old Books 



library ever seen in Scotland, and many sins 
should have been forgiven him for that. His 
verses, which I will transcribe, show him to 
have been a man of wit and manners in his day. 

Jan. 29-31. 
To Mr. James Hoipe, Writer to the Signet. 
Sir, 

These two volumes come to prove 
Your poet's gratitude and love. 
To you, whose taste and friendly spirit 
Encourage the least hints of merit — 
Impartially without regard 
Whether in Shepherd, Lord, or Laird ; 
For which and many an otiier favour. 
That bind me to my best behavi(nir, 
I from this honest heart of mine 
Beg you t'acce])t this small propine : 
Though scant the value, vet believe 
It is the best that I can give, 
And the most proper, you'll allow. 
For me to give to such as you. 

Then with a friendlv smile admit 
Me 'mongst your laughing friends to sit : 
Root yont your Milton and your Pope 
That chant sublime from the hill-top : 



Edinburgh 



127 



Make me a birth-tt'///'//, that I may 
Crane in with Butler, Matt, and Gay ; 
That when the spleen, or aught that's sour, 
Attacks you in a drumbly hour — 
With these, did Allan come before ye. 
And to your gayety restore ye — 
If I in this can i-econimcmi 
My muse to you, I've gained- my end; 
And if you own that 1 can stm'ff 
A song or Tale, nor dull nor dowf, 
At some with no small pride I'll sneer, 
Whose noddles are not quite so clear, 
And never tent their spitefull grumble 
While you stand by your 

servant humble, 

Allan Ramsay. 

From my closet in Edr. 
August loth, 173S. 

There is a spirited portrait by Smibert in the 
first volume, which gives me a desire to say 
with Quince, in " Midstimmer Night's Dream," 

" Let us hear sweet Bottom." 

We find in it such an aspect of ready speech. 
Leigh Hunt's name is on the first page, and his 
marks are to be found throughout wherever 



128 A Shelf of Old Books 



original beauty is to be recognized. One line 
I see, 

"To waft their young white souls through fields of air," 

that is crystallized and will endure. 

The " Gentle Shepherd," too, may well have 
won laurels in his day, and may still command 
a loving reader. Burns was once heard inquir- 
ing for the shop of the author of the " Gentle 
Shepherd." 

The picture of Walter Scott in his interview 
Avith Burns leads us to turn to the goodly row 
of books which are precious because of their 
association with him. 

The copy of the first edition of the " Lay of 
the Last Minstrel " is a fine quarto bound in 
morocco and printed as beautifully as Scott's 
taste and the devoted care of his printer and 
publisher could devise. We can imagine the 
pleasure of the young American book-lover on 
his first visit to Edinburgh in finding this vol- 
ume and making it his own. 

It was fifteen years only after Scott's death 
that Mr. Fields first saw " the gray metropolis 
of the North " and " the castle proudly looming 




Scott. (.From the portrait by Sir Thomas Lawrence, painted for George IV. in 1820, 



Edinburgh 



131 



in the early sunlight," and was received by his 
" landlady in her nightcap at the top of the 
stairs." How speedily he was away again to 
Black's, the publisher, and afterward to Black- 
wood's, " seeing the portrait of John Wilson," 
and much else, we cannot doubt, it being still 
very early in the morning and these gentlemen 
hardly at their ofifices. 

As soon as the coach could start he was away 
to Abbotsford. To his joy he found a Scottish 
lady on the top of the coach beside him who 
knew every inch of the ground, and had seen 
Scott when she was a child. She knew Lock- 
hart, also, and pointed out all the hills and 
castles as she talked, and he was sorry indeed 
when the coach set her down at her journey's 
end. Soon, with hurrying feet, he found him- 
self in Scott's library, " walled about with 
books," which he examined with loving scru- 
tiny. He was deeply impressed with the care 
which had been given them, and recalled Lock- 
hart's saying how full Scott's den in Castle 
Street was of quartos and folios " all in that 
complete state of repair which at a glance 
reveals a tinere of bibliomania. A dozen vol- 



132 A Shelf of Old Books 



umes or so, needful for immediate purposes of 
reference, were placed close by him on a small 
movable frame something like a dumb-waiter. 
All the rest were in their proper niches, and 
wherever a volume had been lent, its room was 
occupied by a wooden block of the same size, 
having a card with the name of the borrower 
and date of the loan tacked on its front. The 
old bindings had obviously been re-touched and 
re-gilt in the most approved manner." 

We can imagine the incipient publisher peer- 
ing about among them and revelling in the 
knowledge that this friend of youth every- 
Avhere, this romance lover and writer, this hero 
of his heart, should be a man to care so ten- 
derly about his books. 

I cannot tell at what " corner shop " he found 
this treasure on his return to Edinburgh, but 
he not only bought it, he also enriched it with 
whatever he could find to add to its value. 
He has laid in it an engraved copy of Chan- 
trey's bust of Scott, and one of the painting by 
Sir Thomas Lawrence, and a note, also, written 
at the moment Scott was sitting for this por- 
trait. Beside these there is a delightful picture 



^xu^^iMj i^U^ iAu^M. 4>w.^ '^ ftv4^ (L^yi^ 



lie of a Note from Scott. 



134 A Shelf of Old Books 



taken when Scott was a child of six years, and 
romantic pictures of his two daughters, by 
Nicholson ; also engravings of Abbotsford and 
Dryburgh. But the charm of the volume after 
all lies in the fact that Scott himself assisted at 




From a miniature of Walter Scott, made at Bath, in his fifth or sixth year. 

this sumptuous debut of his poem and rejoiced 
in its fitting dress; that he handled this ver)' 
copy perchance, and pronounced upon the 
" tooling " of the covers, the thickness of the 
paper, and the kind of type. It brings us 
nearer to him, in short, than anything. 



Edinburgh 135 

One of the curious facts relating to Scott's 
books is the rapidity of their production, and 
Mr. Fields has made a note to the effect that 
" ' The Lay of the Last Minstrel ' was dashed 
off at the rate of a canto a week ! " It seems 
that " Waverley," too, was written at the same 
white heat " in thirty summer evenings," and 
Scott somewhere says, in a letter to a friend : 
" When I once set pen to paper it walks off 
fast enough. I am sometimes tempted to leave 
it alone and see whether the pen will not write 
as well without the assistance of my head as 
with it." 

The success of the " Lay" caused Constable 
& Co. to make Sir Walter an offer for " Mar- 
mion," which he had already begun. The sum 
they mentioned was so large as to startle the 
literary world — it was one thousand pounds. 
Lockhart says of this work: " ' Marmion ' was 
first printed in a splendid quarto, price one 
guinea and a half. The two thousand copies 
of this edition were all disposed of in less 
than a month." 

Where the nineteen hundred and ninety-nine 
other copies may be I know not, but here is 



136 A Shelf of Old Books 



one of that edition before me as I write. This 
cop\- is also enriched b}- a portrait of the 




Walter Scott, writer to the Signet, father of Sir Walte 



mother of Scott, Anne Rutherford, and a pict- 
ure of Abbotsford in 18 12. 

At various times the first editions of the 
" Lady of the Lake " and " Rokeb}^ " were 
added to our collection, and a copy in two 



Edinburgh i37 



volumes (also first edition) of Scott's " Border 
Antiquities." Scott evidently lost nothing of 




Rutherford, Scott's mother. 



his pleasure in beautiful books as he grew 
older, for the last is one both author and pub- 
lisher might be proud of. The fly-leaves are 
rich with inserted portraits and autographs. 



138 



A Shelf of Old Books 



There Avas something in the wholesome 
humanity of Walter Scott which caused men 
and will long cause them to regard nn\'thincx 




Lady Scott. 



which belonged to him, and even the spots he 
haunted, as sacred in their eyes. Since his day 
Edinburgh has become a shrine for pilgrims in 



Edinburgh 139 



a new sense. Men admired the beauty of its 
castle-crowned steep before he Hved, and vis- 
ited Holyrood and caught glimpses here and 
there of its historic interest, but from the mo- 
ment he came upon the scene the whole his- 
toric material of the place was organized and 
vitalized anew. Dinner-table wits of his day 
said that Scott's talk was commonplace, but 
Lockhart once replied : '' Yes, it is common- 
place as the sunshine is which gilds the most 
indifferent objects and adds brilliancy to the 
brightest." 

Adam Black once told Mr. Fields that when 
Scott came stumping along the road with his 
cane and his dog and raised his cheery voice it 
seemed as if his merry laugh cleared the whole 
air ; and from an old man in Glasgow he gained 
still another peep at Scott's delightful nature 
and of his relations with men. It seems that 
this person had carried a law-case to him for 
adjustment. "How did he manage it?" Mr. 
Fields asked. "Oh, beautifully," said the old 
client. '* He told me a bonny story aboot a 
coo and a calf in Dundee, and then he sent me 
over the way to a brither lawyer, who, he told 



I40 A Shelf of Old Books 



me, had a langer head for sich affairs than him- 
sel'. But it was a braw story that he told me 
aboot the cattle o' Dundee, and it makes me 
laugh to this day when I think on't." 

But of all the delightful memories of Scott's 
power of love and sympathy none can outrun 
that beautiful picture of him given by Dr. 
Brown, as he bends over his belated Pet Mar- 
jorie where she sits in her little white dress in 
the ding}' sedan chair in his " lobb}-," while he 
calls his friends from the supper-table to wel- 
come her. " Sit ye there, my dautie, till they 
a' see }'ou." Surely it is this gift above all the 
rest which makes us value the least trifle with 
which he had to do, the gift of which Matthew 
Arnold has said : 

" For will and energy, though rare, 
Are yet, far, far less rare than love." 



FROM MILTON TO 
THACKERAY 




Bust of Milton, about 1654. 
(Reproduced from a photograph of the only mould of the original cast from life, 
preserved in Trinity College Library, Cambridge, England, which was taken 
by kind permission of the Master and Fellows of Trinity.) 



FROM MILTON TO 
THACKERAY 

In John Milton's " Speech to the Parliament 
of England " upon the " Liberty of Unlicensed 
Printing," he says : " Books are not absolutely 
dead things, but do contain a potencie of life in 
them to be as active as that soule was whose 
progeny they are ; nay, they do preserve as in a 
vioU the purest efficacie and extraction of that 
living intellect that bred them. . . . Who 
kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's 
image ; but hee who destroys a good book, kills 
reason it selfe : . . . slays an immortality 
rather than a life." 

The "Areopagetica," * with its inequalities of 

* DeQuincey says of the "Areopagetica": " It is the finest 
specimen extant of generous scorn. And very remarkable it is 
that Milton, who broke the ground on this great theme, has 
exhausted the arguments which bear upon it. He opened the 
subject ; he closed it. And were there no other monument of 
his patriotism and genius, for this alone he would deserve to 
be held in perpetual veneration."' 



144 A Shelf of Old Books 

diction and its immortalities of thought and 
expression, has been made to live again for 
modern readers by means of the introduction 
written for it by Lowell a few years ago, at the 
instance of the Grolier Club of New^ York. It 
stands upon the shelf, a very pretty and a very 
precious small volume with Lowell's inscription 
and alterations of his own text. As an example 
of Lowell's English style, and of the manner 
in which he has, within the small compass of an 
introduction, served to keep the " well of Eng- 
lish undefiled," it is of inestimable and incom- 
parable value to the modern world of letters. 
His criticism of Milton's character, as expressed 
in his style, is a distinct contribution to the his- 
tory of the man ; he has strengthened the arch of 
Milton's fame, and brought us closer to his per- 
sonality. We feel a fresh kinship to the writer 
who, in times not wholly unlike our own, felt 
the public problems to be a weight of personal 
responsibility. 

"As a master of harmony and of easily main- 
tained elevation in English blank verse," writes 
Lowell, " Milton has no rival. He ^\'as " {versed, 
he first wrote) " skilled in many tongues and 



From Milton to Thackeray 



•45 



many literatures ; he had weighed the value of 
words, whether for sound or sense, or where the 
two may be of mutual help. He, surely, if any, 
was what he calls ' a mint-master of language.' 
He must have known, if any ever knew, that 
even in the senno pedestris there are yet great 




Horton, Milton's Early Home. 

differences in gait, that prose is governed by 
laws of modulation as exact, if not so exact- 
ing, as those of verse, and that it may conjure 
with words as prevailingly. The music is 
secreted in it, yet often more potent in sugges- 
tion than that of any verse which is not of 
utmost mastery. We hearken after it as to a 

lO 



146 A Shelf of Old Books 



choir in the side chapel of some cathedral heard 
faintly and fitfully across the long desert of the 
nave, now pursuing and overtaking the cadences, 
only to have them grow doubtful again and 
elude the ear before it has ceased to throb with 
them. . . . Milton is not so truly a writer 
of great prose as a great man writing in prose, 
and it is really Milton we seek there more than 
anything else." Therefore, because we seek 
Milton, we value the early editions of his works 
which are upon the shelf of old books. Dryden 
is said to have remarked, when the first edition 
of " Paradise Lost " met his eye : " The man 
cuts us all out, and the ancients, too." It is not 
unlikely that the quaint remark of Mr. S. Sim- 
mons, the printer, to his "Courteous Reader," 
upon the first page of this first edition, had 
in view Dryden and other celebrated writers 
and critics of that century. It may well have 
" stumbled " Dryden, who never freed himself 
from the shackles of rhyme, to read the stately 
blank verse of Milton for the first time. Milton 
lived largely "in a world of disesteem," and had 
grown somewhat hardy perhaps in the cold 
winds which brought him no fruit of approval 



p o E M s,&j; 



W///^/ UPON '/ 



/•*/' 



Mr 



Several Qccafions. 



JOHN M iIt N: 

o ^ - i^-' • 



BothENGLISH and LATlN,Scc. 
Compoled at (evcral times. 






ichafmallTraaaccof 

EDUCATION 

7oMt. HARTLIB. 

LONDON, 

Printed for Tho.Dnug at the Blew Anchor 

next Mitre Court over againfl: Fetter 

lam m Fieet-Jireh, 1 6y}, 



■^ 



'^- W- i 



A Shelf of Old Books 



from the harvests of the world. He wrote his 
prose with a stinging pen, and when music from 
the upper air came to him for transmission in 
verse he took no counsel from the nether sphere 
as to form or doctrine. His first appearance in 
letters was in the second folio of Shakespeare, 
where three anonymous tributes to Shake- 
speare's genius prefaced the plays. Milton and 
Ben Jonson wrote two of them. A small vol- 
ume came somewhat later, in 1645, containing 
his early poems, the second edition of which, 
printed in 1673, lies before me. It belonged 
to Thomas Gray when a schoolboy, his name 
being written ONLY nine times by himself upon 
the title-page. 

There have been innumerable editions of the 
" Paradise Lost " printed in every variety of lux- 
ury. In opening one large folio of some magnifi- 
cence in book-making, printed in Glasgow in 
the year 1770, I find an apology for a new edi- 
tion. Apparently the university and the uni- 
versity press had set their hearts upon doing 
a fine piece of work, and under the editorship 
of Dr. Newton they printed, bound, and sold, 
chiefly among themselves, the larger part of 



From Milton to Thackeray 149 



the edition. To the names of the Glasgow 
men are added those of a number of the most 
considerable personages of Scotland before the 
era of Sir Walter Scott. The list represents 
fairly well the great world of the North at that 
period, and the titles and well-known names 
add a conspicuous and interesting feature to 
this edition. 

There is still another old book marked " very 
rare," a relic of the days of Milton ; it is a copy 
of his " History of Britain to the Norman Con- 
quest." The volume is labelled " first edi- 
tion;" yet loath as a possessor of jewels must 
be to find that a diamond has been replaced 
by a stone of less pure water, I find myself 
unable to believe that this old book is a first 
edition at all ! The date of its publication is 
1677. Milton died in 1674, and this History 
of Britain was surely published in his lifetime. 
In the " Biography " we are told that it ap- 
peared first in 1670, seven years before the date 
of the book in my hand ; also that the first 
edition contained a portrait by Faithorne. It 
is impossible now to say by whom the portrait 
was made in this, evidently, second edition. 



150 A Shelf of Old Books 



The painter's name is not upon the engraving, 
which is pasted in upon a fly-leaf. Doubtless 
some enthusiastic owner took it for granted 
that this was a " first edition," and therefore 
affixed a printed label with the announcement 
on the outside of the book below the title. 

A very interesting edition of Milton's Poeti- 
cal Works is the one in seven volumes, owned 
by Leigh Hunt, with his notes. On the whole, 
for the reader and lover of poetry this is one 
of the most delightful books possible. Leigh 
Hunt remembers what Keats and others have 
said by way of criticism, and in the right 
places their words are jotted on the margins. 
There is one more literary relic of Milton, an 
old folio of his prose works, printed in 1697 ; 
nothing could be more quaint, more clumsy, 
more interesting ! Whether his speeches and 
pamphlets were brought together previously, 
or whether this is a first edition of them collect- 
ive!)', I cannot say. The titles and prefaces 
and heading are all evidently as Milton in- 
tended them to be, and we are invited into 
his very presence as we turn these old pages. 
We feel with Wordsworth : 



From Milton to Thackeray i:;^ 



"We must be free or die, who speak the tongue 
That Shakespeare spoke ; the faith and morals hold 
Which Milton held " 

There is, however, an older book standing 
beneath this shelf than any which has ever 
stood upon it ; it is one that fills me with a 
kind of awe as I look at it, yet which impels 
me to hold it with affection and to read its 
pages as I read no other " prophane " volume. 
This book is a copy of North's " Plutarch," 
printed in 1603 ; a book which Shakespeare 
knew and which he might have held. The 
strong leather cover has been patched, but 
perhaps not wholly remade. The bookworms 
have found their way through it, yet the pages 
remain clear as the day they were printed. 
The name of a former owner, who lived at 
Bramfield Hall, Suffolk, is slowly fading off the 
title-page, but the stately title itself is un- 
changed, and the name of " James Amiot, 
Abbot of Bellozane, Bishop of Auxerre, one 
of the King's privie Councell and great Am- 
ner* of France," who translated these lines of 

* The Amner (presumably Almoner) was the highest eccle- 
siastical dignitary of France, to whom was given the super- 
intendence of hospitals. 



154 A Shelf of Old Books 



the noble Grecians and Romans, out of Greek 
into French, appears in all its majesty, leading 
in the name of the great English translator, 
from French into English — Sir Thomas North, 
Knight. It is a most majestic old book, and 
one to be touched with reverence. It shows 
no disdain to the lover of pleasure. Amiot 
says to his readers : " The reading of books 
which bring but a vain and unprofitable 
pleasure to the reader, is justly misliked of 
wise and grave men. Againe, the reading of 
such as do but only bring profit, and make the 
reader in love therewith, and do not ease the 
paine of reading by some pleasantnesse in 
the same ; do seeme somewhat harsh to divers 
delicate wits. . . . But such books as yield 
pleasure and profit . . . have all that a 
man can desire." Both the great Bishop and 
the English Knight fell in love with that book, 
and spared no labor to bring it to a worthy 
presentment ; and to this day the readers of 
North's translation will feel themselves re- 
warded. 

But we must confess it is not the general 
interest of the book alone which attracts us to 



From Milton to Thackeray 155 

this volume : it is the fact that Shakespeare is 
said to have fed his brain upon this story of 
Julius Caesar and to have drawn his play there- 
from. 

We find concerning Caesar that "he was often 
subject to headach, and otherwhile to the 
falling sicknesse (the which tooke him the first 
time as it is reported in Corduba, a city of 
Spaine)." 

In the play of " Julius Caesar," Cassius says 
of him : 

" He had a fever when he was in Spain, 
And when the fit was on him, I did mark 
How he did shake." 

And again Casca says : 

" He fell down in the market-place, and foamed at the 
mouth and was speechless." 

''Brutus. 'Tis very like; he hath the falling sick- 
ness." 

We know well that this malady of Caesar 
was a matter of history, but the likeness of 
expression is, at the least, remarkable. 

In the old volume we find the story of the 
defeat of the Nervii, and that the Roman Senate 



156 A Shelf of Old Books 



decreed a sacrifice and solemn processions for 
fifteen days, having never made the like ordi- 
nance before for any victory ; therefore, when 
Mark Antony, in the play, speaks to the people 
over the dead body of Caesar and shows them 
his mantle, he tells them it was the one he 
wore on a summer's evening : 

"That day he overcame the Nervii." 

Also the tale is told of the feast Lupercalia, 
where Caesar sat in a chair of gold and " Anto- 
nius was one of them that ranne this holy 
course ; he came to Caesar and presented him 
a diadeame wreathed about with laurel. . . . 
But when Caesar refused the diadeame, then 
all the people together made an outcrie of 
joy." 

The picturesque does not fail. We can see 
the kindling eye of a great poet passing from 
line to line and gathering up the story which 
was to be made permanent in the beauty of 
his imagination. The soothsayer is here ; the 
" spirits running up and down in the night " and 
" solitaire birds to be scene at noone dales sit- 
ting in the great market-place." 



From Milton to Thackeray 157 



Further, we find in the old book that Caesar, 
doing sacrifice unto the gods, found that one 
of the beasts which was sacrificed had no heart ; 
and " that it was a strange thing in nature how 
a beast could live without a heart." 

Shakespeare wrote : 

" Enter a Servant. 
Ccesar. What say the augurers ? 

Servant. They would not have you to stir forth to-day. 
Plucking the entrails of an offering forth, 
They could not find a heart within the beast." 

And then the death of Caesar with every 
detail, and the ghost that came to Brutus, all 
are here. 

The more carefully we read and compare the 
texts, the more surely we discover that from 
these pages (possibly, wonder of wonders, from 
this page) the poet we name William Shake- 
speare drew the body of his immortal play of 
"Julius Caesar." 

We close the great covers reverently and put 
the silent witness back under the lighter shelf. 

In Mr. Andrew Lang's pleasant book called 
" The Library," he speaks of the difificulty in 
these decadent days of picking up literary 



1 58 A Shelf of Old Books 



treasures, a thing so frequently done by those 
who knew, forty, thirty, and even twenty years 
ago. Nevertheless, we would whisper, let not 
those who possess the knowledge, and the 
opportunity of following the quest, lose all 
hope. Good things may be found even in 
these degenerate days ! But thirty years ago, 
what might not be discovered by searching in 
London or Paris, and sometimes almost with- 
out the excitement of the hunt! 

For instance, upon this shelf stands a beauti- 
ful copy of " Rasselas " — not a first edition, but 
one of the fine Ballantyne reprints of 1805, 
illustrated by Smirke, with engravings by 
Raimbach ; quite good enough to make the 
eyes of the book-hunter sparkle. 

Imagine the joy of the enthusiastic buyer, 
having left the shop, the book paid for and 
safely tucked under his arm, to find, as he 
turned into a quiet street to take a look at his 
new purchase, to find, I say, hidden between 
the leaves a letter in the well-known handwrit- 
ing of Dr. Johnson himself. 

It was almost too much to believe, and the 
question immediately arose in the young pub- 






I J ' ^ ' • , f » I 

Cv:w.' ^U^-U U^ Q>fil JXfj^iv/.^. ._.._ 

■ ^^ (.'w , uuJ ju. wcw "(V U 4 ^' '^K' ^ /-^ 

_, .. ^-. - 4- ^ - -"^ — 

^l V- fv-^^ ^^ f^^'": ^-^^ (..Liu.- w.U 



Fac-simile of Letter written by Dr. Johnson 






i^cA'^ 1,!,. /. r2„ 



From Milton to Thackeray i6i 



lisher's mind, " To whom does this letter be- 
long?" At one moment the fortunate posses- 
sor would shut up the book and start for home, 
in the next he rapidly retraced his steps, and 
at last did not pause until he had again 
reached the door of the small shop where his 
purchase had been made. By this time he had 
resolved what to do ; he would first discover if 
the seller of the book knew of the existence of 
this treasure, and then they could decide to- 
gether upon the right step to take. The book- 
seller was astonished at the sight of the letter, 
and confessed at once that he could make no 
claim upon it, as he was ignorant of its exist- 
ence until that moment. However, the matter 
was soon settled to the satisfaction of both 
parties ; they decided upon the price such a 
letter should bring, and one-half of the value 
was paid to the bookseller, who had uncon- 
sciously allowed such a prize to slip through 
his fingers. In " My Friend's Library," the 
letter appears in print for the first time, but a 
fac-simile is given here. 

It is addressed to the Rev. Mr. Compton, 
who was a Benedictine monk living in Paris 
II 



i62 A Shelf of Old Books 



when Dr. Johnson first went there, in 1775- 
The monks entertained him in the most 
friendly way, giving him one of their own 
cells for his headquarters. James Compton 
questioned Dr. Johnson on the subject of the 
Protestant faith, and asked if he might come 
to see him in Bolt Court. " In the summer of 
1782, he paid the Doctor a visit, and informed 
him of his desire to be admitted into the 
Church of England. Johnson managed the 
matter satisfactorily for him, and he was 
received into Communion. . . . Through 
Johnson's kindness he was nominated chaplain 
at the French Chapel of St. James. . . . 
Thus by the friendly hand of the hard-working 
lexicographer, Mr. Compton was led from 
poverty up to a secure competency, and a 
place among the influential dignitaries of Lon- 
don society." Recalling some of the fine 
humanities of the men of that period, Thack- 
eray speaks out in a burst of eloquence. " O 
you, fine gentlemen ! You Marches and Sel- 
wyns and Chesterfields, how small you look 
by the side of these great men I " And again, 
after quoting " the verses — the sacred verses" 



From Milton to Thackeray 163 



on the death of Levett, which it goes hardly 
with me not to copy again here, he continues : 
" I hold old Johnson (and shall we not pardon 
James Boswell some errors for embalming him 
for us ?) to be the great supporter of the British 
Monarchy and Church during the last age. 
. . . What a humanity the old man had ! 
He was a kindly partaker of all honest pleas- 
ures. . . . When he used to frequent Gar- 
rick's theatre, and had ' the liberty of the 
scenes,' he says, ' All the actresses knew me, 
and dropped me a curtsey as they passed to 
the stage.' That would make a pretty picture ; 
it is a pretty picture in my mind, of youth, 
folly, gayety, tenderly surveyed by wisdom's 
merciful pure eyes." 

Standing with the above-mentioned copy of 
Rasselas is a " First Edition " of " Johnson's 
Tour to the Hebrides," a book which brings 
one as near to shaking hands with the author 
as anything now in existence. It wears a coat 
of browai leather lined with the marbled paper 
of that period, and the title-page reads, " A 
Tour to the Western Islands of Scotland, 
1775." The matter has that rare quality in 



1 64 A Shelf of Old Books 



an old book of travel, of preserving its interest 
to this day. The wild scenery of the north 
of Scotland has seldom been more vividly 
portrayed. Sir Walter Scott has thrown his 
enchanting light upon it, and we have seen 
much in company with the Princess of Thule, 
but the truthful and often bald narratives of 
the experiences of Johnson and Boswell on the 
" Tour " are not out-worn. 

The American reprint of the work issued in 
i8iO stands by the side of the original edition 
with a coat made to match ! Inside the cover 
of the first edition is written in pencil, " With 
suppressed passages; see Davies's 'Journey 
Round the Library of a Bibliomaniac' " This 
volume belonged to a certain Davies whose ini- 
tials are indistinct, but presumably to Thomas 
Davies the bookseller, to whom there are a 
good many references in the " Life and Let- 
ters " of Johnson. ^^ 

* Boswell says : " Mr. Thomas Davies, the actor, who then 
kept a bookseller's shop in Russell Street, Covent Garden, told 
me that Johnson was very much his friend, and came fre- 
quently to his house, where he more than once invited me to 
meet him. ... At last, on Monday, May i6th, when I was 




Dr. Samuel Johnson. 
(Engraved by Watson from portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds, painted for the Duke of Sutherland in 1770.) 



From Milton to Thackeray 167 



In the American edition of the " Tour" there 
is also a pencil inscription referring to a beau- 
tiful verse of which Johnson was a sincere ad- 
mirer — often was this quatrain quoted by the 
lovers of true poetry who lingered a century 
later around the London breakfast-table of 
Samuel Rogers. Mr, Fields wrote it on this 
fly-leaf with a reference to the page upon 
which it is introduced. Boswell narrates the 
occasion as follows : 

" We came to Nairn to breakfast ; though a 
county town, and a royal burgh, it is a miser- 
able place. Over the room where we sat, a 
girl was spinning wool with a great wheel, and 
singing an Erse song : ' I'll warrant you ' (said 
Dr. Johnson) ' one of the songs of Ossian.' He 
then repeated these lines : 

'Verse sweetens toil, however rude the sound. 
All at her work the village maiden suigs : 
Nor while she turns the giddy wheel around 
Revolves the sad vicissitudes of things." 

sitting in Mr. Davies's back parlor, after having drank tea 
with him and Mrs. Davies, Johnson unexpectedly came into 
the shop. ... I never pass by it [Boswell adds in a note] 
without feelinfr reverence." 



i68 A Shelf of Old Books 



" I thought I had heard these lines. 

" ' I fancy not, sir,' Johnson replied ; ' they 
are in a detached poem, the name of which I 
do not remember, written by one Giffard, a 
parson.' " 

This verse is not a single instance of the 
manner in which a perfect line or quatrain, as 
in this case, will sometimes avoid the sweeping 
waters of oblivion. Long after the generations 
of men who first heard it and the genera- 
tions of poets who loved it have passed on, 
the living verse still lingers to sweeten the 
toil of life. 

The latest editor of Johnson's letters, Dr. 
Birkbeck Hill, who is not easil}- foiled in any 
research, determined to hunt up the author of 
the stanza. He discovers him to have been 
Rev. Richard Gifford, not Giffard, who wrote a 
poem called " Contemplation," two years after 
Gray's " Elegy," and perhaps suggested by it, 
in which the verse in question occurs. Mr. 
Gifford " mentioned with much satisfaction that 
Johnson quoted the poem in his Dictionary," 
but it is quoted with changes which make it 
the beautiful thine" we know. Gifford wrote : 




Ludlow Castle, the scene of Milt t ^ 



From Milton to Thackeray 171 

" Verse softens toil, however rude the sound ; 
She feels no biting pang- the while she sings, 
Nor as she turns the giddy wheel around 
Revolves the sad vicissitude of things." 

Dr. Johnson has, with a few touches, shown 
us what a poet can do to help the verse writer. 
The second line, which is his own : 

" All at her work the village maiden sings," 

is a drama moving to music, the centre and life 
of the verse. 

I have elsewhere referred to an edition of 
Boswell's Johnson, owned by Leigh Hunt ; but 
in this connection I may speak of it more fully 
in relation to Dr. Johnson and his editors. 
Croker, against whose work Dr. Birkbeck Hill 
empties the vials of his just wrath, has never- 
theless, by means of the skill of John Murray, 
the publisher, made a very pretty edition in 
ten comfortable little volumes, containing illus- 
trations and dignities commensurate with the 
name on the title-page: "The Right Honor- 
able John Wilson Croker, M. P." 

Mr. Fields has pasted upon the fly-leaf of 
the first volume the following description from 



172 A Shelf of Old Books 



the Ladies Magazine, London, 1784, December 
20, of Dr. Johnson's funeral. 

" This day," the paragraph reads, " the re- 
mains of the much-lamented Dr. Samuel John- 
son were interred in Westminster Abbey. 
The procession, consisting of a hearse and six 
with the corpse, and ten mourning coaches and 
four, set out from Bolt Court, Fleet Street, a 
few minutes after twelve o'clock, being fol- 
lowed by several gentlemen's carriages, most of 
the company in which were in mourning. At 
one o'clock the corpse arrived at the Abbey, 
where it was met by Dr. Taylor (who read the 
funeral service) and several prebendaries, and 
conducted to the Poet's Corner, and laid close 
to the remains of David Garrick, Esq. The 
principal mourners on this solemn occasion 
were Sir Joshua Reynolds, Mr. Edmund Burke, 
Sir John Hawkins, Mr. Coleman, and the de- 
ceased's faithful black servant. There were 
present besides. Dr. Priestly, Dr. Horsley, 
General Paoli, and other distinguished persons. 
A great concourse of people were assembled, 
who behaved with a degree of decency suitable 
to the solemn occasion." 



From Milton to Thackeray 173 



The brevity and dignity of this account con- 
trast with the " scare-heads " and flaming Hnes 
and portraits sometimes given in notices of the 
" great occasions " of to-day ; nevertheless there 
is a nearness to facts and persons which enables 
us to review the whole scene. 

In this edition also there is an engraving 
from a portrait by Bartolozzi, of Dr. Johnson, 
inserted in the fly-leaf, which differs from Rey- 
nolds's portraits by giving a look of kindly 
inquiry to the face. There is less intellectual 
assertion and a gentle look of human interest 
which must have been native to it in certain 
moods, because it belonged to his character. 

The notes from Thomas Holcroft also, to 
which a former reference has been made, cover 
several finely written pages in Leigh Hunt's 
hand; their bearing is chiefly upon the charac- 
ter of Boswell, from whose snobbishness Hol- 
croft had evidently suffered. Miss Mitford * 
gives the sketch of the life and history of 

*Miss Mitford's paper upon Thomas Holcroft may be found 
in her "Recollections of a Literary Life." She speaks of his 
memoirs, begun by himself and concluded by Hazlitt; as being 
a very curious history, both for the vicissitudes of the life and 
the indomitable character of the man. 



174 A Shelf of Old Books 



Holcroft, who was a man of great talent ; but 
being the son of a shoemaker, he suffered more 
keenly from Boswell's meanness than others 
who have written of him from more favorable 
points of view. Sastres, an Italian, is also 
quoted as disliking Boswell, and Hunt remarks 
that " the omission of Boswell's name in John- 
son's will is remarkable and, I cannot but 
think, very damaging." All the extracts from 
Holcroft are worthy to be read as a part of the 
history of the time, and of individuals who have 
made that time memorable. 

Leigh Hunt's notes usually have something 
which makes them interesting ; they do not 
possess always the highest value, by any means, 
but there is either a personal or a literary flavor 
about them which will doubtless give most of 
them a place in the editions of the future. For 
instance, where Johnson is speaking of his first 
London lodgings and says, " It used to cost the 
rest a shilling for their dinner, for they drank 
wine ; but I had a cut of meat for sixpence, 
and bread for a penny, and gave the waiter a 
penny; so that I was quite as well served, nay, 
better than the rest, for thev gave the waiter 



From Milton to Thackeray 175 



nothing." "Lord Byron," says Leigh Hunt in 
a note, " in repeating this story, of which he 
was fond, used to dwell upon these particular 
words, ' a cut of meat,' with great and pleasant 
gusto." This scrap gives us a glimpse of the 
ever}--day Byron, and reminds us of another 
exclamation of his, quoted by one of his biogra- 
phers, that he hated to see women eat. 

There would be a much greater pleasure in 
turning over the old pages of what is now a 
very rare book, "Anecdotes of Dr. Johnson by 
Mrs. Piozzi," if our faith in that lady had not 
been very rudely shaken of late by certain 
newly-found letters. But it smacks of the 
daily life of the great man, and must always 
be precious to us, remembering the days and 
hours he passed in affectionate intercourse 
under the roof of Mrs. Thrale. We must take 
the bitter with the sweet when we accept such 
benefactions as were conferred upon the world 
by herself and James Boswell ; and if we are 
sometimes inclined to feel that we wish to 
hear nothing further from either of these per- 
sonages, let us reflect for one instant what the 
world of letters would suffer if their work were 



176 A Shelf of Old Books 



withdrawn. Let us recall what Johnson him- 
self said, quoted by Mrs. Piozzi in this same 
book : " The cup of life is surely bitter enough 
Avithout squeezing in the hateful rind of 
resentment." 

He was indebted to Mrs. Thrale for a delight- 
ful house of refuge, and if in later years she 
was less kind to him than the angels, he was 
not ungrateful nor willing to think ill of her. 
There are one or two extant portraits of her, 
but in the picture by Hogarth called " The 
Lady's Last Stake," her features are said by 
some adventurous believers in the legend to 
be more truly portrayed than anywhere else. 
Miss Lynch was about eighteen years old when 
she sat to Hogarth for the figure in this pic- 
ture. It was engraved at Lord Macaulay's 
suggestion in 1861, for Hay ward's edition of 
the "Autobiography of Mrs. Piozzi." 

Johnson used to say that " the size of a 
man's understanding might alwa}'s be justly 
measured by his mirth." His own love of wit 
and humor found scope and appreciation in his 
friendship with Garrick. The life of the great 
actor b\' Arthur Murph)% printed in Red Lion 



178 A Shelf of Old Books 

Passage in 1801, is likely to be rather a rare 
book now. It contains a copy of the fine 
portrait of Garrick by Reynolds, engraved by 
Schiavonetti, and is in itself most pleasant 
reading.* Here we find Dr. Johnson and Gar- 
rick going to London together, the former Avith 
a tragedy in his pocket ; here we find descrip- 
tions of the great actresses of the period, of 
Mrs. Gibber, Mrs. Woffington, Mrs. Pritchard, 
Mrs. Abington, Mrs. Clive, and the rest of that 
delightful galaxy ; all of them only too glad to 
share the stage and the applause with Garrick. 
And here also we find Johnson writing a Pro- 
logue for his friend " in a stile, if we except 
Pope's to the tragedy of ' Cato,' superior to 
everything of the kind in the English lan- 
guage." 

Garrick at length brought out Dr. Johnson's 

* The Atheiiccuni of May, 1894, says, in commenting upon 
a new and excellent Life of Garrick, just published, that 
"Tom Davies's volumes are interesting and perfectly unaf- 
fected ; Murphy's, a turgid performance, amusing from its 
florid bursts, but valueless from its emptiness of facts and 
details." 

Valueless it may be to the lovers of research, but full of 
the flavor of contemporaneous writing. — A. F. 



From Milton to Thackeray 



179 



tragedy of " Irene," but although it held the 
stage nine nights, " the united powers of Gar- 
rick, Barry, Mrs. Gibber, and Mrs. Pritchard 
could not raise it into vogue."* 

"The celebrated Dr. Smollett," too, appears 
upon the stage of life presented in these pages, 




Garrick s Villa. 

with a farce in his hand which seems to have 
made no great effect. Altogether, Arthur Mur- 
phy produced a friendly book, and he was 



Byron wrote : 

"A haltered heroine Johnson sought to slay: 
We saved Irene, but half damned the play. 



i8o A Shelf of Old Books 



evidently quite worthy of the strong liking 
which Dr. Johnson had for him.* 

One good thing among others which should 
have been in his pages, he has failed to record. 
There is an epigram made by one of the wits of 
the period, which was often upon Mr. Fields's 
lips when the actors of that day were discussed ; 
it refers to the rivalry between Garrick and 
Barry at the time when " the town " was di- 
vided upon the subject of their merits. The 
author of the verses is not known, f but they 
read as follows : 

"The town has found out cliff 'rent ways 

To praise the cliff'rent Lears ; 
To Barry they give loud huzza's ! 

To Garrick only tears.:}: 

* It was Arthur Murphy who first introduced Dr. Johnson to 
Mrs. Thrale, and doubtless the sentiment of gratitude also 
mingled with his liking for the young man. 

f Since writing the above a friendly correspondent informs 
me that the author is Rev. Richard Kendal, of Peterhouse, 
Cambridge, and refers me to Dodd's " Epigrammatists." In 
the " Life of Garrick," by Percy Fitzgerald, the lines are 
attributed to one " Mr. Berenger." 

X A slight difference will be seen in the reading of this first 
stanza, as found in the old renderings and in the verse as it 
stands in " Yesterdays with Authors." In the latter version, 



From Milton to Thackeray 18 1 

" A king ! ay, every inch a icing, 
Such Barry doth appear ; 
But Garrick's quite another thing. 
He's every inch King Lear ! " 

The verses and Johnson's favorite stanza, 
quoted above, both carry us to the breakfast 
table of the poet Rogers, where these good 
things were to be heard, having been stored 
away in his capacious memory. Rogers was 
very friendly to the young American publisher 
from the first moment of their acquaintance, 
and it was at one of these famous breakfasts 
that he called his old attendant Edmund to his 
side, and bade him bring a copy of his poems 
to present to Mr. Fields. 

which was repeated from a memory of Rogers's recitation, we 
find it set down as follows : 

" The town have chosen different ways 
To praise their different Lears : 
To Barry they give loud applause — 
To Garrick only tears." 
Surely there is better grammar as well as a flavor of the 
antique in the old stanza which is delightful and superior to 
this. The second stanza I have been unable to find in the 
older records of that time, although it may be in the Life of 
Garrick by Tom Davies, which I have not at hand. 



1 82 A Shelf of Old Books 



When the man returned he handed Rogers 
the small edition ; he was again despatched to 
find one of the beautiful copies in two volumes 
which were already famous for their exquisite 
illustrations and book-making. This edition 
will long be a model for its perfect binding and 
printing, apart from the uncommon excellence 
of the reproductions of original designs, made 
for Rogers chiefly by Stothard and Turner. 
The pictures from which the engravings were 
made, by Goodall, Finden, and others, already 
adorned the walls of his house. The external 
beauty of these volumes almost makes one for- 
get to speak of their contents ; but any true 
lover of letters will rejoice in the scholarly 
character of the verses, and will find the notes 
most interesting reading. 

The word " scholarly " easily leads us to 
Gra\% whose work was especially venerated 
by the owner of this library. During Mr. 
Fields's first visit to England, Stoke Pogis, 
where Gray lies buried, was one of the places 
he chose to visit, and where we find him in 
the twilight copying the inscription from the 
monument. Later in life he came into posses- 



From Milton to Thackeray 183 



sion of two books which belonged to Gray, 
both of them containing interesting autographs 
and notes. 

His sincere admiration of the poet led him to 
gather everything which fell in his way belong- 
ing to his work or to his life. Among these 
relics is an autograph fragment, consisting of 
many pages of a chronological history which 
Gray was preparing at the time of his death. 
The clear, neat -writing is to be envied ; there 
is no mistaking the letters, nor are they 
cramped nor formal. There is also an old 
quarto volume containing "The Poems of Mr. 
Gray, to which are prefixed Memoirs of his 
Life and Writings, by W. Mason, M.xA..," 1775. 
As Gray lived to 1771, this is probably the first 
edition of his life and works given to the world. 
Prefixed to the poems stand these words of 
Quinctilian : " Multum et verse glorias, quamvis 
uno libro, meruit." 

It would be a weariness to the reader, were 
the various editions and readings of Gray, scat- 
tered through other shelves, to be enumerated ; 
— some quaint, others magnificent "specimens 
of book-making," others simply a " last edi- 



A Shelf of Old Books 



tion." But they bear witness to the love of at 
least one reader in spite of the devouring waves 
of a whole century of time. 

Mr. Fields mentions, in " My Friend's Li- 
brary," the volume of " The Rape of the 
Lock," which belonged to Charles Lamb. 
The missing pages torn from the little book 
(for which it appears Lamb paid sixpence) are 
restored in his own beautiful handwriting. It 
seems to bring us somewhat nearer to Lamb, 
to find that thirteen years after his death, when 
Mr. Fields was calling upon Moxon, the pub- 
lisher — who married, it will be remembered, 
Emma Isola, the adopted child of Charles and 
Mary Lamb — Moxon showed his American 
friend the remnant of Elia's library, and gave 
him at the same time this precious book from 
the collection,* A new and beautiful edition 

* Mr. Fields says : "Perhaps the most interesting to me 
of all the private libraries I have ever seen in England, was 
the small collection of Charles and Mary Lamb, which Ed- 
ward Moxon, the publisher, unlocked for me when I was first 
in England, before the books were dispersed, as they never 
ought to have been. Then and there I lovingly handled his 
Kit Marlowe, his Drummond of Hawthornden, his Drayton, 
his Cowley, and his Burton ! I remember how Moxon's whole 






/'ft- J^ A^ v^i«, ^/^ 'h^r"^ '9^Ki£ - 



-^-^ .Vrvrp. ^ «^>;..^^. 






/"^^ "^' '-'/"^-^ y. 



Fac-simile of a Letter from Charles Lamb. 



A Shelf of Old Books 



of Lamb's works, edited by Thomas Noon Tal- 
foLird, had then been published only a few 
years (1840). It was evidently one of Mn 
Fields's most valued books.* He also managed 
to find a copy of " Mrs. Leicester's School," by 
Mary Lamb, to which, Talfourd says, " Lamb 
contributed three of the tales. The best, how- 
family stood around that ' Life of the Duke of Newcastle by 
his Duchess,' and told stories of Lamb's enthusiasm over the 
book, a volume about which he has written : ' No casket is 
rich enough, no casing sufficiently durable to honor and keep 
safe such a jewel."" 

* Everything connected with Lamb has such human interest, 
and the portraits of him are so unsatisfactory, that the follow- 
ing description of his person by Leigh Hunt, who knew him 
intimately, is of value to modern readers. Leigh Hunt says : 
" Charles Lamb had a head worthy of Aristotle, with as fine 
a heart as ever beat in human bosom, and limbs very fragile 
to sustain it. There was a caricature of him sold in the 
shops, which pretended to be a likeness. Procter (Barry 
Cornwall) went into the shop in a passion, and asked the man 
what he meant by putting forth such a libel. The man 
apologized, and said that the artist meant no offense. There 
never was a true portrait of Lamb. His features were 
strongly yet delicately cut ; he had a fine eye as well as 
forehead ; and no face carried in it greater marks of thought 
and feeling. It resembled that of Bacon, with less worldly 
vigor and more sensibility." 



From Milton to Thackeray 187 

ever, are his sister's as he delighted to insist ; 
and no tales more happily adapted to nurture 
all sweet and childlike feelings in children were 
ever written." We of a later century do not 
concur with Lamb's estimate, especially when 
we read that lovely tale about going to church, 
which is a model, and the despair of young 
story writers. " The Poetry for Children," an- 
other joint publication, is safely kept among 
the beloved treasures, also Lamb's " Ulysses." 
These are all pretty little books, and early 
editions, though probably not the first. One 
of the autograph letters of Lamb, laid among 
these memorials, has an amusing anecdote con- 
nected with its transfer to our shelf. Barry 
Cornwall (Mr. Procter) was talking of Lamb, 
one day, Avith Mr. Fields, speaking of his own 
tender love for him and looking over his letters. 
" I will give you this one ! " he said. " Cram 
it into your pocket, for I hear my wife coming 
down stairs, and perhaps she won't let you 
carry it off." 

Mrs. Procter was for the larger part of a 
century one of the most brilliant women in 
London society. Dickens said of her that no 



i88 A Shelf of Old Books 



matter how brilliant the men were who sur- 
rounded her — and they were all that London 
had of the best — she always gave the last and 
wittiest rejoinder. Her powers of social endur- 
ance were wonderful. The Saturday Reviczv 
said of her that " Lady Kew herself, whom ]\Irs. 
Procter did not otherwise resemble, was not 
a more indefatigable diner-out and attendant 
at evening parties. ... It was intellectual 
society which she enjoyed and to which she 
contributed at least as much as she derived 
from it. . . . The graphic simplicity with 
which she told her stories was beyond all 
praise. . . . Her crisp, sharp sentences 
were a rebuke to the mumbled sins against 
sense and grammar which too often pass mus- 
ter for English conversation. . . . Mrs. 
Procter might have repeated with absolute 
sincerity the touching lines of Lamb. She 
warmed both hands before the fire of life, 
and when it sank she was ready to depart." 
The last time I had the pleasure of seeing 
her, she had long passed her eightieth birthday. 
She had " assisted " in the morning at a mar- 
riage in the family of Lord Houghton ; she had 



From Milton to Thackeray 



lunched in company ; she was holding a recep- 
tion at her own house, and, in speaking with 
a young lady who was taking leave, I heard 
her say : "• But I shall see you this evening ! " 
"No," said the young lady; "I am rather 
tired after our day, and I shall not go out 
again." " Nonsense, my child," answered the 
old soldier. " Why, I am going to dine out 
first, and go to the reception afterward. What 
is the matter with you young people?" 

When she passed away, a few years ago, the 
world lost almost the last person acquainted 
nearly and socially with the brilliant group of 
poets who made the first quarter of the cen- 
tury an epoch in English literature. The 
London Academy said of her : " By her mother's 
marriage with Basil Montagu, she was brought, 
when quite a child, into contact with Lamb 
and Coleridge, Keats and Leigh Hunt, and 
other men of note, who frequented the house 
of the editor of Bacon, and she speedily learned 
to hold her own among the wits, her masterful 
and clear intellect early asserting itself. By 
her own marriage with Barry Cornwall, whose 
' Mirandola' had three years before stirred the 



I90 A Shelf of Old Books 



town, with Macready in the title part, and 
Charles Kemble as Gnido, she cemented her 
connection with the world of letters, and be- 
came the close friend of a younger generation 
— of Thackeray and Dickens, the Laureate and 
Mr. Browning. She survived to be looked up to 
with respect and curiosity by a third genera- 
tion, to whom the friends of her youth were 
English classics, qiiietis ascripti ordinibiis Dco- 
riini. Not that Mrs. Procter was at all a mere 
repository of reminiscences. She took a keen 
interest in the topics of the day, and her talk 
was admirable, both for what she said and 
the way in which she said it. She held strong 
opinions of her own on most subjects, and 
about most people, and often her expression 
of them was more emphatic than cautious, and 
this earned her a reputation for bitterness she 
did not deserve, for she was essentially kind- 
hearted." 

Mrs. Procter had at one time written down 
a number of recollections of the eminent men 
she had known ; but she was so shocked by 
the posthumous publication of Carlyle's ' Remi- 
niscences,' that she is believed to have de- 










^t^ ct^al ^^ ^c^r'^.^ i^ yC. 



^^^ -^ ^ £2^ 



Fac-simile of a portion of a letter from Mrs. Procter. 



192 A Shelf of Old Books 



stroyed her diaries as well as the letters in 
her possession. Thackeray's letters to her, 
which were numerous and interesting, were 
thus irrevocably lost among the rest. 

Lowell, who saw Mrs. Procter frequently, 
was, of course, justly esteemed by her as one 
of the most delightful of all her shining cocn- 
pany. " Something might be written about 
her," he said when the news of her death 
came to America. But unless Mr. Henry James 
can do it for us, we now seem to lack the 
mental camera which will throw on paper 
the portrait of this distinguished woman as she 
moved through a long half-century of London 
society. 

Li one of Mrs. Procter's letters to Mr. Fields, 
after her husband's death, she says : " You 
knew and loved my dear one ! He never blew 
his own trumpet, and the foolish world requires 
you to say, * Fall down, adore me ; I am the 
cleverest man living.' There is a true story of 
Sydney Smith and Macaulay. The latter had 
been on a visit to the great wit, and, on seeing 
him off in the stage-coach, he said : " Farewell, 
Macaulay ; let no man persuade you that you 



From Milton to Thackeray 193 



are not the greatest man in the world. . . . 
The fault of the memoirs is that there are no 
letters of my husband's. Foster had destroyed 
his, and the Brownings' also. . . . And his 
letters to me were too tender to be printed 
in my lifetime. 

" Your old friend, 

" Anna B. Procter." 

Queen Anne's Mansion, 
S. W. London. 

We have left Charles and Mary Lamb while 
we hold the letter of the former in our hands, 
in order to speak of the donors ; but we cannot 
willingly leave them yet altogether. Near by 
are the letters and books and manuscripts of 
Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke, who knew 
Lamb, and through whom we have, as it were, 
been in touch with him. Mrs. Cowden Clarke 
says of Lamb : " It seems as if it were yester- 
day that I noted his eager way, when he was 
at Margate, of telling me about an extraordi- 
narily large whale that had been captured 
there ; of its having created lively interest in 
the place ; of its having been conveyed away 
13 



194 A Shelf of Old Books 

in a strong cart, on which it lay a huge mass 
of colossal height ; when he added, with one of 
his sudden droll, penetrating glances, ' The eye 
has just gone past our window.' " 

In one of his letters he says: "Your books 
are as the gushing of streams in a desert. By 
the way, you have sent no autobiographies. 
Your letter seems to imply you had. Nor 
do I want any. Cowden, they are of the 
books which I give away." A copy of the 
final " Memorials of Lamb," given to Mr. 
Fields by Moxon, begins to look like one of 
the books of which Lamb was fond. He 
used to hug a rare folio all the nearer to his 
heart for its worn edges and shabby binding. 

Talfourd speaks in this book of the London 
Magazine as being the exciting cause of the 
" Essays of Elia." Even in those days, it 
appears, a great stimulus was given to the 
world of literature by the creation of a mag- 
azine ; and we cannot fail to look \\'ith interest 
upon the tall ragged volumes of TJie Tattler^ 
The London Journal, and other survivors of 
those times. 

The London Magazine itself, however, pre- 



From Milton to Thackeray 195 

sents a noble front, perfect in its line and 
brave in leather binding, with gilt letters. 
" Never," says Talfourd, " was a periodical 
work commenced with happier auspices, . . . 
There was Lamb, at his indiscreetest, best ; 
Barry Cornwall, . . . streaking the darkest 
passion with beauty ; John Hamilton Rey- 
nolds, . . . and Hazlitt, who was giving 
some of his best work to the world for the 
first time through this medium." The name 
of John Hamilton Reynolds is sailing safely 
down to posterity upon the wing of Keats. 
The following exquisite verses are among the 
poems which are connected with his name. 
These lines are too little known. Buxton 
Forman says : " Keats seems to have been 
really writing in a kind of spiritual parallel- 
ism with the thrush's song, . . . following 
in a sense the bird's methods of repetition." 
Therefore he entitles them, "What the Thrush 
said : Lines from a Letter to John Hamilton 
Reynolds ": 

"O tliou whose face hath felt the winter's wind, 
Whose eye hath seen the snow-clouds hung in mist, 
And the black elm tops 'mong the freezing stars, 



A Shelf of Old Books 



To thee the spring will be a harvest time ; 

O thou, whose only book has been the light 

Of supreme darkness which thou fecidest on 

Night after night when Phoebus was away, 

To thee the spring shall be a triple morn. 

O fret not after knowledge ; I have none. 

And yet my song comes native with the warmth. 

O fret not after knowledge ; I have none. 

And yet the evening listens. He who saddens 

At thought of idleness cannot be idle, 

And he's awake who thinks himself asleep." 

In the year 1796 a small book was printed 
with the title " Original Letters, etc., of Sir 
John Falstaff." The copy before me bears 
the inscription " See Charles Lamb's reference 
to this little book." Following this lead, we 
find in Talfourd's life that it was written by 
"Jem White," of whose humor Lamb once 
said, "There never was the like! We never 
shall see such days as those in which Jem 
flourished." 

"All that now remains of Jem," Talfourd 
continues, " is the celebration of the supper 
which he gave to the young chimney sweep- 
ers, in the Elia of his friend, and a thin duo- 
decimo volume which he published in 1796, 



From Milton to Thackeray 197 

under the title of ' The Letters of John Fal- 
staff,' with a dedication (printed in black let- 
ter) to Master Samuel Irelaunde, which those 
who knew Lamb at the time believed to be 
his." " White's Letters," said Lamb, in writing 
to a friend about this time, " are near publica- 
tion. His frontispiece is a good conceit; Sir 
John learning to dance to please Madame 
Page, in dress of doublet, etc., from the upper 
half, and modern pantaloons, with shoes of the 
eighteenth century, from the lower half, and 
the whole work is full of goodly quips and 
rare fancies, ' all deftly masked like poor an- 
tiquity.' " 

It is said that Lamb never found one of 
these little books in a stall, or thrown aside 
among a pile of unsalable waitings, that he 
did not buy it. He could always get it for 
sixpence a copy. In this way he kept all his 
friends provided. In writing to Manning, to 
whom he had evidently sent a copy, he says : 
" I hope by this time you are prepared to 
say the ' Falstaff Letters ' are a bundle of 
the sharpest, queerest, profoundest humorous, 
of any these juice-drained latter times have 



A Shelf of Old Books 



spawned." It is rather a curious fact, also, 
that there was an American reprint of these 
"Letters" in 1813, nearly eighteen years after 
their issue, because we cannot help whisper- 
ing, in spite of Charles Lamb's enthusiasm for 
his friend's work, that they seem to good 
judges at this period to be quite unreadable. 
Southey, Moxon, Talfourd, and Ainger all 
seem to agree that Lamb had a hand in the 
editorship, and surely the preface is full of his 
wit. It is a precious little book, because 
Lamb loved it, and Mr. Fields wrote inside, 
" Oh, be careful of it ! " 

As I lay this favorite relic aside, my eye is 
caught by the poems of Katherine Philips, 
" The Matchless Orinda," whose folio, pub- 
lished in 1678, is at hand. I fear the 
poems of this lady might have been over- 
looked in this age of many books, if the appre- 
ciation of a great poet had not rescued her 
from oblivion. In one of Keats's letters to 
Reynolds he says : " I had longed for some 
real feminine modesty in these things, and was 
therefore gladdened in , the extreme on open- 
ing, the other day, a book of poetry written 



From Milton to Thackeray 199 



by one beautiful Miss Philips, a friend of 
Jeremy Taylor's, and called 'The Matchless 
Orinda.' You must have heard of her, and 
most likely read her poetry. I wish you have 
not, that I may have the pleasure of treating 
you with a few stanzas." He took the pains 
to transcribe one of the poems in full, the 
same that Buxton Forman copies in the Ap- 
pendix to his " Life of Keats," and Lord 
Houghton reproduced in 1848, and, of course, 
Sidney Colvin later. 

These poems of Katherine Philips have had 
a strange history. Some years before her 
death a surreptitious edition had been printed 
without her knowledge, and was upon the eve 
of being issued to the public when the fraud 
was discovered through the agency of a friend. 
In spite of every possible precaution, it appears 
that many of the copies were sold afterward. 
She writes a letter to the friend who did her 
the kind office to withdraw the stolen volume 
from the public, saying: "This is a most cruel 
accident, and hath made so proportionate an 
impression on me, that really it hath cost me 
a sharp fit of sickness since I heard it." Not 



200 A Shelf of Old Books 



many years later she was snatched out of life 
by the ravaging small-pox, at the age of thirty- 
one. After her death the effort was made to 
publish her poems correctly, but with limited 
success, because they lacked her own revision. 
The portrait of her, also, is said to be " not 
very like her, only a poor paper-shadow." But 
the poems themselves have the true poetic life 
in them which Keats's keen sense discerned. 
The poem which he chiefly loved is written 
to " Mrs. Mary Aubrey at Parting," and con- 
tains verses of the most exquisite beauty. It 
would take too much space to transcribe the 
whole poem here, but we cannot pass on with- 
out giving one or two of the stanzas : 

" And thus we can no absence know, 

Nor shall we be confined ; 
Our active souls will daily go 

To learn each other's mind. 
Nay, should we never meet to sense, 
Our souls would hold intellig-ence. 



" By my own temper I shall guess 
At thy felicity, 
And only like my happiness 
Because it pleaseth thee. 



From Milton to Thackeray 



Our hearts at any time will tell 
If thou or I be sick or well." 

Keats loved these poems for their womanl}', 
as well as their poetic, qualities. Where else 
can we look in all literature for such an apothe- 
osis of love between woman and woman — love 
on earth even as it is in heaven ? She was a 
true lover indeed. Was there ever one quite 
like her? One of these poems is addressed: 

To my excellent Lucasia on our friendship : 
" I did not live until this time 
Crowned my felicity, 
When I could say without a crime, 
I am not thine, but thee." 

We find a poem addressed to Mr. Henry 
I.awes,* which carries us back into the circle 
of Milton's friends once more. 

* " Henry Lawes, who composed the musick for Comus 
and performed the combined characters of the Spirit and the 
shepherd Thyrsis in this drama, was the son of Thomas 
Lawes, a vicar-choral of Salisbury Cathedral." ... He 
appears to have been well acquainted with the best poets 
and the most respectable and popular of the nobility of his 
times. . . . Lawes is said to be the first who introduced 
the Italian style of music into England. ... He died 



A Shelf of Old Books 



To him she writes : 

" Beauty is but composure, and we find 
Content is but the concord of the mind. 

So poets on the lower world look down, 

But Lawes on them ; his height is all his own ; 

in 1G62, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. Of all the 
testimonies paid to his merit by his contemporaries, Milton's 
commendation, in the thirteenth sonnet and in some of the 
speeches in "Comus," must be esteemed the most honorable. 

Sonnet XIII. 
To Mr. H. Lawes, on the publishing his Airs. 
Harry, whose tuneful and well-measured song 
First taught our English music how to span 
Words with just note and accent, not to scan 
With Midas ears, committing short and long. 
Thy worth and skill exempts thee from the throng, 
With praise enough for envy to look wan ; 
To after age thou shalt be writ the man, 
That with smooth air couldst humor best our tongue. 
Thou honor'st verse, and verse must lend her wing 
To honor thee, the priest of Phoebus' quire. 
That tun'st their happiest lines in hymn or story ; 
Dante shall give Fame leave to set thee higher 
Than his Casella, whom he woo'd to sing, 
Met in the milder shades of Purgatory. 
"The songs of Lawes, to a very great number, are to be 
found in the collections entitled ' Select Musical Ayres and 
Dialogues,' folio 1652; 'Ayres and Dialogues,' 1653; and 
• The Treasury of Music,' i66g. . . . Among them are 
most of the songs of Waller set bv Lawes.'" 



From Milton to Thackeray 

For, like Divinity itself, his lyre 
Rewards the wit it did at first inspire. 
And thus by double right poets allow 
His and their laurel should adorn his brow.' 



20} 




Henry Lawes. 

Her Avit is charming! See the following: 

Hoist up the sail, cry'd they who understand 
No word that carries kindness for the Land; 
Such sons of clamour, that I wonder not 
They love the sea, whom sure some storm begot." 



204 A Shelf of Old Books 



Of pleasure she writes: 

" We covet pleasure easily, 
But it not so possess ; 
For many things must make it be, 

But one may make it less ; 
Nay, were our state as we could choose it, 
'Twould be consumed by fear to lose it." 

And again of death : 

" If I be sure my soul is safe. 

And that my actions will provide 
My tomb a nobler epitaph. 

Than that I only live and dy'd, 

" So that in various accidents 

I conscience may, and honor keep; 
I with that ease and innocence 
Shall die as infants go to sleep." 

We find ourselves let loose in a flower-bed ; 
how can we stop gathering the beautiful things! 
Keats is half at fault for this, for he led us 
hither. But the old book must be resolutely 
closed with a commendation to those who love 
true simple poetry to get the volume of "The 
Matchless Orinda " and read her verses ! 

As I turn to review the books once more, I 



From Milton to Thackeray 205 



seem to see one kindly face — large, full of 
humor, full of human sympathies, which makes 
me forget the shelves and consider " first edi- 
tions " as childishness. The face belongs to 
Thackeray, and I can recall his goodness to 
one who, although married already, was hardly 
more than " a slip of a girl," and very much 
afraid of him. Afraid, let me say, rather of 
the idea of him, the great author and famous 
lecturer, who was making his crowded audi- 
ences laugh or cry at his simple word every 
evening ; the great man of the moment whom 
everybody was " running after," yet of whom 
they said that he liked his friends so much 
better than all their noise about himself that he 
was alwa}-s trying to escape from it, and here 
he was! coming to see — whom? Well, it ap- 
pears it did not so much matter, for he was 
bent on kindnesses, and he took it all in at a 
glance, and sat down by the window and drew 
me to him and told me about his " little girls " 
at home. How he walked down the wrong 
side of Piccadilly one day, and so lost what 
money he had out of his pocket — money 
which belonged properly to these same dear 



2o6 A Shelf of Old Books 

girls of his ; therefore it came about that 
he made up his mind, though it was hard 
enough, to come away from them and get 
something to take back to them in place of 
what he had lost, and how they were the dear- 
est girls in the world, and when I came to 
England I should find them more like tvv^o old 
friends, and should have somebody, I am sure 
he thought, " to play with," though under the 
circumstances he could not use just those 
words ! 

And then, soon after, he went away, leaving 
a great trail of sunshine and kindness behind 
him, which has never faded. 

The next time I saw him among the books, 
was with a company of gentlemen who had 
been asked to meet him. I remember he was 
told that Rufus Choate was one of the invited 
guests, but he had not yet made his appear- 
ance. A note from Mr. Choate came in after 
the little group was assembled, and it was a 
great amusement to them all, the effort to 
decipher the almost undecipherable handwrit- 
ing. The gist of the matter was at length 
reached — he could not come. And Thackerav, 




"mmm 






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1 




Thackeray when about Thirty Years Old. 



From Milton to Thackeray 



209 



who had never heard — but only heard of — his 
eloquence, was greatly disappointed. 




The joy of hearing the Immortal lectures 
then began ! How " everybody " went ! How 
14 



A Shelf of Old Books 



the matter and the manner were upon every 
tongue ! There are two drawings on the shelf 
of him made by a young artist of the time, 
caricatures which, in spite of their absurdity, 
recall his delightful manner and looks as he 
stood before his audiences, to the life. I re- 
member one other interview with Thackeray 
during his visit to America, in New York 
(and it is a digression to speak of it here, to 
be forgiven, I trust). He was coming down 
a long flight of steps into the street after one 
of the lectures. We were in front, and we 
were with Washington Irving (ah, what a 
joy that was, and what a gladness still to 
recall him !) Thackeray startled the little 
group by overtaking us and striking Irving 
briskly on the shoulder (they were evidently 
much at home together) ; then turning to us, 
" And here's the very little woman I was telling 
you of to-day!" at which sally, since he evi- 
dently had not been telling anything very seri- 
ous, we all laughed, and then he began to relate 
the experiences of the evening. It was only a 
touch, a glance, a nothing, as one may say, but 
that warmth and sunlight of his nature alwaj's 



From Milton to Thackeniy 2 1 1 

seemed to waken a new flower of existence 
into being where it shone even for an instant. 



^ Phut pixr Moncn- Jom 7om^^^^ 




Tetl TaU _ 

A Caricature by Cruikshank 

Here are the first editions of some of his 
books: "The Rose and the Ring," "Dr. Birch 
and His Young Friends," " Rebecca and Ro- 



212 A Shelf of Old Books 



wena," and a review of Cruikshank's work 
made into a pretty little volume with original 
illustrations ; but how we almost forget to 
speak of them when we are thinking of the 
dear writer himself.* I sometimes wonder if 
the "Unwritten Memoirs" will not some day 
recall one of the Punch dinners in Onslow 
Square, when I was allowed to sit up-stairs 
"with the ladies," his own "dear girls" (I do 

* Thackeray's charm was never more delightfully exercised 
than in this paper upon Cruikshank. He says in it, " He is 
the friend of the young especially. Have we not all read 
the story-books that his wonderful pencil has illustrated ? Did 
we not forego tarts, in order to buy his ' Breaking-Up' or his 
'Fashionable Monstrosities' of the year eighteen hundred and 
something? . . . But though in our eyes Mr. Cruikshank 
reached his apogee some eighteen years since, it must not be 
imagined that such was really the case. Eighteen sets of 
children have since then learned to love and admire him, 
and may many more of their successors be brought up in the 
same delightful faith. . . . The reader will examine the 
work called ' My Sketch-Book ' with not a little amusement, 
and may gather from it, as we fancy, a good deal of informa- 
tion regarding the character of the individual man, George 
Cruikshank. . . . Our artist loves to joke at a soldier. 
. . . Tall life-guardsmen and fierce grenadiers figure in 
many of his designs, and almost always in a ridiculous 
way." 



From Milton to Thackeray 213 



not recall any strangers), and how some of the 
good things were brought to us for dinner on 
a small table in the hall if I remember well, 
where Thackeray came now and then in the 
course of the evening to have a little jollity 
and see that the ball was rolling merrily up- 
stairs as well as down. The good things 
which came with him were so much better 
than any of the good things which were 
brought for dinner, that I forget everything, 
what was said or what was done or what 
we ate, save that kind, loving, beneficent 
presence which will always remain in our 
hearts when the things of this world have 
passed away. 

It need not be told here that Thackeray loved 
the great world and the strange, noble, and 
even ignoble creatures it contains ; he loved 
delightful women always, and " liked to see 
them straight " as he says somewhere ; and 
would have said to his favorites, as Dr. John- 
son said to Mrs. Thrale, " Be brisk, and be 
splendid, and be publick ; " but he loved above 
all his fireside-corner and his "little girls" and 
the friends they drew about them. Not the 



r i 

I i 



If 



From Milton to Thackeray 215 

least characteristic incident of his Hfe is his 
flight home from America, leaving his engage- 
ments to lecture and everything else to take 
care of themselves, because he saw Christmas 
approaching and stockings which might be 
otherwise unfilled. He bravely said he was 
homesick; and with no excuse to any one, he 
stepped on board a Boston steamer, and van- 
ished thus from the centre of his admirers. 



PP 2 9 1950 



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